Re: Towards a new LPPL draft
On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 09:50:07PM +0200, Frank Mittelbach wrote:
> uniformity in a different way. but being as it is, I see no good alternative
> as trademarking several hundred file names isn't (and wouldn't help Debian
> either).
I'm probably missing something obvious, but if the name "LaTeX" were
trademarked and could only be used by systems that are created so as
not to conflict with any package that could be obtained from CTAN, would
that not actually provide better protection than is currently available?
You'd need to allow for the case where someone is distributing something
OK, then a new package is added to CPAN and it's no longer OK (e.g. allow
"someone" to continue to distribute their already-available version but
not any subsequent version with the conflicting name), but this potential
for future conflicts might also encourage people to work more closely with
you and CTAN when making modifications, lest you later decide to do it
"right" and in doing so force them to rename their extensions.
Anybody who didn't want to play could distribute things their own way, but
could not use the name LaTeX do describe their work, either in documentation
or within the work itself. I think this would probably be a good balance.
It would after all prevent the introduction of incompatible extra packages
that are not derived works of any LPPL-licensed work. It wouldn't protect
anything not (yet) in CTAN, but there's no current protection from namespace
conflicts between unrelated non-CTAN works anyway.
All the third-party modules author has to do to in order to be able to
guarantee that their users will not be fooled by an incompatible package
is then to get their package in to CTAN, and they can use any license they
like (so long as it's acceptable to CTAN).
Note that this also automatically protects users of non-LPPL packages that
are part of CTAN from incompatibilities, which I guess is not the case at
present.
What would be the problem with this scenario?
Cheers,
Nick
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp@lemon-computing.com
Accent on helpful side of your nature. Drain the moat.
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