Re: TeX Licenses & teTeX (Was: Re: forwarded message from Jeff Licquia)

[Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>]

Boris Veytsman <borisv@lk.net> writes:

> I afraid you are in state of denial. You have certain ideas about
> programmer's freedom. You value these ideas too much, you just cannot
> accept the fact that Knuth does not share them.

I doubt it's that.  I think it more likely that Thomas is arguing
against your insistence that TeX be removed wholly from Debian by
explaining his interpretation of the issues.  In his interpretation,
TeX is DSFG-free, and in yours, it's apparently not, so it seems to
me that you're trying to get TeX removed from Debian.  (Why, I'm not
sure.)

> Knuth publicly accused them that they violated his rights (I do not
> remember whether he mentioned copyright, trademark or both, and this
> page is no longer avialable on the Web).

Here's the link to the old version of Knuth's page about this:

http://web.archive.org/web/19970712011550/http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cm.html

It seems that Knuth was clear about his wishes:

"Dear friends, I decided to put these fonts into the public domain
rather than to make them proprietary; all I have asked is that nobody
change them, UNLESS THE NAME IS CHANGED,....  This compatibility must
be enforced by peer pressure (boycotts, bad publicity, etc.), to
anybody who breaks the rules."

In other words, Knuth was not claiming that people were breaking his
license or that the law had anything to do with it.  He was merely
claiming that he did a lot of work to make things the same
everywhere, people broke that, and anyone who agreed with him should
yell at the people who broke things.

That's DSFG-free.  

> There was no court case; rather Slackware chose to switch to
> teTeX. I never had heard of NTeX thereafter.

I don't know if the switch had anything to do with the font
fiasco... teTeX was just better.

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
Guns don't kill people off-line readers do.