Re: Towards a new LPPL draft
Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu> writes:
> Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org> wrote:
>> Yikes. I'd accept the former as free before the latter, personally.
>> Giving users options is one thing, but option two seems to suggest
>> that if Latex is forked for some reason we'll need to ferry around the
>> original (from the date of the fork) version of latex whenever
>> distributing the new version, forever. That's a far more onerous
>> requirement than file renaming, imho.
>
> This is specifically allowed by DFSG #4. The Q Public License uses
> this feature as well. If you don't like it, feel free to call a
> General Resolution to change it. Until then, it is still part of the
> DFSG.
It's quite similar, yes, but I can distribute a patch without the file
it patches. If, for example, I have to include an entire pristine
Latex installation with any fork, that's a significant burden indeed.
Not that the LPPL could necessarily legally require such a thing, but
if that's the intent of the Latex developers, I find it too onerous.
In fact, as a rather off-topic question, if you have a license to
distribute but not modify a package with three files (foo, bar & baz),
and you have a patch for foo that makes it a useful program in its own
right, can you distribute foo + patch, omitting bar & baz? But I
imagine that if this is possible at all it falls into some murky
category of fair use.
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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