Re: A few more LPPL concerns
On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 12:36:59AM +0200, Frank Mittelbach wrote:
> single person is envolved. However the sysadmin case is on the other side of
> the fence (sorry Nick to disappoint you, just saw your post :-) as it
> typically means providing a "non-latex" under the label of "latex" to
> unsuspecting users and depriving them of their expectation to get identical
> documents.
>
> so in case of Nick's company example i would expect them to call their
> modified latex company-latex or whatever, ie forking at kernel level and if
> necessarily forking via the cfguide suggestion so that every file can be
> changed easily individually if they want to change much. even more so in the
> case of a sysadmin for an installation with varying number of people, eg in an
> university or so.
>
> but i agree this may not be a distribution in legal sense and the wording may
> have to change and closed groups should probably generally be exempt.
Take my company. There are 4 of us working there. I'm quite likely to want
to make a small modification to some part of LaTeX to make it behave how I
want it to. It's been a long time since I used LaTeX heavily, so I'm not
likely to be terribly clued-ep up the "right" way to do things.
Irrespective of the enforcibility of your deciding that I am distributing
LaTeX when I install it for our use, I would argue that the constraints you
mention under the current license draft make the LaTeX license clearly and
categorically non-free in spirit.
The question arises "at what point does it become reasonable to require
a name change?"
For example, in a larger environment (such as a University) it would clearly
be good practise at the very least to make prominent the fact that our
installation was non-standard. It would also be pretty inexcusably poor
form not to have standard LaTeX available -- which implies that either I
would have to learn the "right" way to do it, or make two distinct versions
available.
There is of course a fairly continuous spectrum of other situations between
the two described above.
I guess it really comes down to users' expectations, but this is not an area
that is amenable to watertight wording. I do however think that if you manage
to answer this question clearly and without ambiguity, then you may find that
you have come up with a solution with wider applicability...
Cheers,
Nick
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp@lemon-computing.com
Don't worry. Life's too long.
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