Re: forwarded message from Jeff Licquia
On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 11:59:37AM +0200, Martin Schröder wrote:
> This is absolutely relevant. LaTeX is just a set of macros run
> through an interpreter. The interpreter happens to be some
> implementation of TeX. The security problems will be in the
> interpreter, not in the macros. And the parts of the
> implementation concerning these possible problems are under GPL.
Under the LPPL we are not allowed to fix the engine either; we have to wait
for D. E. Knuth to do it. Which I'm sure he would do, unless he happened
to have been run over by a bus that morning (unlikely, as he claims to be
sitting at home working on Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming
most of the time, but...). In which case we would have a nightmare time
trying to migrate all our LaTeX users from LaTeX to not-LaTeX, which would
be identical to LaTeX but for the fact that it used not-quite-TeX instead
of TeX...
If on the other hand the LaTeX license allowed us to do "whatever we like,
so long as anything that's called LaTeX produces identical output (documents)
to unmodified LaTeX for all valid input" then we could butcher LaTeX to use
a not-quite-TeX that had the bug fixed, and still produced identical output.
For example.
Cheers,
Nick
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp@lemon-computing.com
Is this really happening?
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