Re: User's thoughts about LPPL
David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> writes:
> 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.
Perhaps latex is a miserably poor interchange format. Or perhaps
the language needed a clear standard and clear documentation. After
all, the way the world of C programmers solved this problem was by
careful standardization, not by insisting that there should be Only
One C Compiler.
Perhaps the best thing to do is to have a notice requirement so that
users know what they are getting.
But geez, if the only thing that matters is guaranteeing
interchangeability, no matter what, then just make it propietary and
be done with it. Then you can pretty much do whatever you please. Of
course, it's not free.
Freedom includes the right to do things that you (and even I) think
are stupid. Debian stands for freedom.
> > 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.
Naw, they'd be done by totally different people without even any
collusion.
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