Re: Suggestion for dual-licensed LaTeX (was Re: Encoding the name in the file contents (was Re: Towards a new LPPL draft))
Jeff Licquia writes:
> On Thu, 2002-07-25 at 10:34, Brian Sniffen wrote:
>
> > [...]
> >
> > Those who care primarily about the freeness of software, or who wish
> > to take a macro language apart and put it together again, would use
> > FreeLaTeX. Debian could distribute FreeLaTeX in its main archive.
> > There would be no guarantee that FreeLaTeX would not have many
> > incompatible versions.
> >
> >
> > Frank, Debian folk, what do you think? Would this meet both of your
> > requirements?
>
> I'm not keen on forking unless we need to fork. If we have to make a
> change that the LaTeX Project doesn't like, then yes, we need to fork.
I second Jeff here. From the LaTeX Project point of view that wouldn't be a
desirable outcome at all.
Reason: this would actively promote that a good number of machines would
*only* have something installed (at least by default) which is very close to
the ULL language but not identical. And as (at least in the beginning) both
systems would basically be able to process the same documents and produce
identical or nearly identical output the problem of incompatible variants
would only show up after a while when both (or more) such variants are in use.
Please don't missunderstand me as if I'm trying to hold up "ULL" or "Standard
LaTeX" as something better then another typesetting system derived from it, or
that we try this way to prevent better systems to emerge based on original
code written for LaTeX. On the contrary.
I would suggest for (nearly) all typesetting systems to use a license like
LPPL, simply because (nearly) all of them have as one of their purposes the
goal to allow interchange of documents.
A similar situation, by the way, exists for XML and friends. What about docbook
dtd and entity files etc, their names are tied to content as well just like
style or class files in latex.
frank
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