Re: Knuth statement on renaming cm files and Licence violation.
Brian Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu> writes:
> Bear in mind, Russ, nobody is questioning whether TeX (or LaTeX) are
> *good* software, or *useful* software, or even *open source* software.
I understand.
> The question is whether they are free software. A restricted API, which
> you call a protected API, is not a free API.
I understand that viewpoint and even agree with it to a degree.
On the other hand, this has been the copying policy for TeX fonts since
pretty much the beginning of TeX. This isn't new. Which makes me
confused when I see comments like:
> There'll probably be an attempt at a fork from the last known free
> license,
because it seems to me like they misunderstand the nature of the
situation. So far as I know, this is very basic to the nature of TeX;
according to Knuth's writings that I'm familiar with, it was part of his
goal in how he wrote the TeX system from very early on. There is no "last
known free license" that I've heard of in the sense that you mean.
RMS considered TeX part of the GNU System from the writings that I'm
familiar with since very early on in the development of that system, so
apparently, at least from that, did not have a problem with the copying
policy. I suppose it's possible that he was unaware of it, but that seems
very much unlike his normal extreme care with such things.
Now, if the new LaTeX license is going beyond that, that's another matter,
and I want to be careful to point out here that I'm not commenting
directly on that, only specifically on the issue of the CM fonts, because
I have more of a grasp on that. I also think that authors of LaTeX
packages should really think about whether they actually need the
guarantee that Knuth was striving for, and whether they've done all of the
*other* things that Knuth did to achieve his goals. Most of them,
frankly, have not, and this provision does nothing for them and is really
rather pointless and they would be much better served by some other
license.
What brought me into this argument, though, is basically a question of
principal, namely that licenses should be evaluated as if they were
enforcible even if written in a way that may make them legally
unenforcible for some reason and even if the person doesn't intend to
enforce them. And actually, I doubt that people really disagree with me
on that.
If Knuth's actual position is that the legal license on his fonts is
public domain and that he has no interest in forcing anyone to use
different names, only to get upset at them if they do, and if that
satisfies the legal requirements of Debian wrt the DFSG, then that's all
fine and good. But I personally still find it important that it's *not*
morally okay to modify the CM fonts and redistribute them under the same
names.
To me, one of the most important parts of the gift culture is to respect
the terms of the gift, if the giver felt like they wanted to put terms on
it for whatever reason of their own. Even if they don't intend to enforce
those terms with lawyers.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: