Re: spokesman (was Re: User's thoughts about LPPL)
>>>>> "Boris" == Boris Veytsman <borisv@lk.net> writes:
Boris> This is exactly the same with LaTeX. If you create a new
Boris> format newlatex.fmt and symlink /usr/bin/tex to
Boris> /usr/bin/newlatex (this is the UNIX TeX way to use
Boris> formats), then you have a complete freedom to load
Boris> newarticle.cls whenever your document calls article.cls.
Hmm. An interesting point. From a purely pragmatic standpoint I
suspect Debian would simply choose to keep its current LaTeX packages
rather than write infrastructure for this sort of support. It would
certainly be enough to convince me to stop using LaTeX.
It would be ironic if Debian ended up forking LaTeX because of a
license designed to promote standardization.
But you're right, if the LaTeX license allows this it may be DFSG free.
There's another issue though. When I discussed TeX, I carefully
avoided discussing whether the TeX license allows us to have a
modified version of TeX (which does not pass trip) invoked by
/usr/bin/tex. We cannot call that program TeX. However it is not
clear to me that having an executable called TeX to preserve makefiles
that depend on being able to shell out to /usr/bin/tex counts as
calling a program TeX.
The Debian community may decide that restricting API constants like
filenames or command names violates DFSG 3, by precluding large
classes of derived works where as restricting what a program can be
called in some vague sense referring more to documentation, claimed
feature set, and program output is OK.
We had a bit of a discussion of this issue on IRC and some people
pointed out to me that even if requiring renaming of files is OK, LPPL
may still violate DFSG 3 on some technicalities. IF we resolve all
the big issues we can come back to this point.
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