Re: apache non-free?
On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 12:44:40PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> [Your Mail-Followup-To is either broken, or we've found a postfix bug.]
>
> On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 05:02:23PM +0100, Jean-Christophe Dubacq wrote:
> > In TeX and LaTeX, programs are allowed to be modified, but must change
> > their names. This is considered free. The situation with Apache is
> > different: the word 'Apache' may not be used at all in the name of the
> > derivative. But I might have misunderstood some point.
>
> Uh, if they're that strict about it, what they really want is trademark
> protection.
Well, I think Knuth had two objectives in his licenses on TeX:
1) Anything which calls itself a TeX implementation must work exactly
like TeX. Although it may be completely independently written. This,
as you point out, is a trademark issue, and is enforced as such (TeX
is a registered trademark of the American Mathematical Society, IIRC).
2) Anybody who wishes to use Knuth's actual code (which is encouraged)
must change the name of the source file(s) concerned, simply so that
third parties won't be confused into thinking they have the original
version. This isn't really a trademark issue (you can't trademark
'texmain.c', or whatever), so it's enforced by the copyright license.
Many of the LaTeX source code files share the view espoused in (2),
and enforce it the same way.
IMHO, (1) is perfectly reasonable and laudable. (2) is
understandable, but rather misguided (again, IMO).
Jules
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