Re: Towards a new LPPL draft
On Tue, 2002-07-23 at 16:36, Mark Rafn wrote:
> On 23 Jul 2002, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> > The rights we demand are usually for special cases.
>
> I strongly disagree. The rights we demand are guaranteed to our users,
> and they get to decide what's a special case and what's a burning need.
Right. I spoke poorly in this statement; my intent was to state
Debian's specific needs and reassure the LaTeX people that we aren't
planning on destroying LaTeX anytime soon. User needs of course may be
different.
I think they have a legitimate concern about what we distribute versus
what users do. What a user does may affect his machine and maybe a few
others, but what Debian does can affect thousands of machines.
> This seems free to me, using the second option. I don't know of any other
> packages that require distribution of source (instead of making source
> available seperately) and require patches seperate from original source,
> but I can live with it, unless I've missed some subtlety.
>
> Definitions should be clear, though. Pristine source can be distributed
> with a modified version in the same way that other source is distributed
> with the binaries, which is to say that users can choose not to download
> or install it (though they'd then be barred from redistributing it). It
> may even be delivered on a different medium (i.e. include a source CD with
> unmodified LaTeX to go with the memory-constrained PDA that has tinyLaTeX
> in firmware).
Do you think that it is non-free for a license to require *distributors*
to always provide the option to use pristine source when running
something? As long as they also have the choice of using the modified
version (without any other restrictions on things like the filename in
question), I don't see that as impinging on freedom.
The main thing would be whether a user would have the option of removing
the pristine files, as in the case of tinyLaTeX you mention.
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