Re: Towards a new LPPL draft
On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 12:10:11AM +0100, David Carlisle wrote:
> > 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?
>
> we've been over this already. That (might be) fine for latex but it
> offers no help at all to the vast majority of LPPL'ed software that isn't
> called latex.
> > 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).
>
> There is nothing in LPPL that requires ctan distrib. In particular your
> solution would allow Debian to make arbitrary changes to every
> third-party latex package with no licence constraints at all, so long as
> they distributed the changes themselves rather than resubmit them to
> ctan, perhaps that's your intention?
I was thinking rather that distributors would not be able to make incompatible
changes (i.e. any which affect the output) to any CTAN module if they still
wanted to call the system it works in 'LaTeX'.
As I said, I would think that the system I was suggesting would actually
provide better protection than currently, as it would protect users of
CTAN modules even if the author was disinclined or unable to use the LPPL.
But if it's important to you that modules not part of CTAN should be
protected (although as I said, I don't believe that protection is
particularly strong), and there is no other (at least that anyone can think of)
way of defining the modules which a user should be able to expect to
function identically across all systems, then I guess you can't do it
that way.
Which is a shame, IMHO, but 'to each his own'.
Cheers,
Nick
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp@lemon-computing.com
Afternoon very favorable for romance. Try a single person for a change.
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