Re: User's thoughts about LPPL
> But you have *no* way to assure this, short of trademarking the name
> "latex".
That is a very tired argument.
Of course it is true as written, but it ignores the fact that LPPL has
been remarkably successful in its stated aims.
Prior to the latex2e licence (which from which LPPL was derived)
"latex" could be (and often was) locally modified and re-distributed.
It got so bad by around 1990 that passing a latex document from one site
to another was largely a matter of luck.
I had some of my latex packages modified on ftp sites in the US and I
only discovered this when I started getting bug reports, and finally when
I got the user to send me a full tracing log it turned out the code
had been changed and uploaded on to the ftp site without changing the
version number or any indication as to who'd changed it.
the latex2e licence (later generalised to become the LPPL by replacing
"latex" by "the program", so that other people could easily use it on
contributed packages) stabilised things greatly and now there is again a
real sense in which latex is a stable document format that you can use
to pass focuments round the world in a reliable manner.
Yes if someone wants to deliberately spoof latex using all new code that
mirrors the latex distribution they can do that. But that was never the
danger: the danger was people making well intentioned local
"improvements".
Indeed, I can do two things:
> Make a derivate work of latex, which is variant, and called
> "special-non-latex".
>
> Make a package with no derivatives of latex at all, which contains a
> single symlink: 'latex -> special-non-latex'.
>
> Happy with that?
Happy with the first but not the second which, taken with the first,
would be producing a derived work and re-using the latex name.
David
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