Re: Knuth statement on renaming cm files and Licence violation.
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>>>>> On Wed, 4 Sep 2002 16:13:24 +0100, David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> said:
>> The reference to enforcement by shunning and community effort seems to
>> indicate otherwise. I've been trying to read that statement from
>> every angle I can think of, but I just can't find a consistent meaning
>> other than that Knuth has put this in the public domain, but makes strong
>> requests of the community of users of the code he wrote.
> I don't think so. He states clearly that this is in violation of the
> copyright notice, the bit about community pressure is an indication that
> he thinks that is an effective way (as opposed to the courts) of
> enforcing the rules. (It seemed to work in that case:-)
I don't see that as clearly as you do. He says it's in violation of
the stipulation on the copyright page of C&T:E, which isn't quite the
same thing. TeX, METAFONT, and the CM fonts certainly were under his
copyright at some point in the past, and there are copyright notices
- From that era. Perhaps this should be taken to mean that even though
they're now in the public domain, the wishes expressed in those
copyright notices should still be followed?
> Sadly, I don't own a copy of Computers & Typesetting vol E either.
> Frank's quoted parts of it here:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200208/msg00009.html
> No doubt he could quote the full text of the notice if it's thought
> important.
I was trying to avoid that message in particular: the last message
has a grave misunderstanding of the DFSG, and the quotation from C&T:E
is only indirect. Also very serious is the interpretation of
"software systems that agree exactly with the program presented here."
Frank seems to believe that this refers to the text of the source
code... and I disagree. I think it's much more likely that this
refers to an agreement at the system level, that the output is
correct for all input (which of course prohibits the introduction of
new features, but not more efficient algorithms which produce the same
output, or translated comments).
- -Brian
- --
Brian Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
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