Re: Revised LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL)

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit bts@alum.mit.edu (Brian T. Sniffen)

> Would it make it less of a misrepresentation if the comment produced
> output to the screen that this wasn't Standard LaTeX?

AFAIU, what the authors of the LPPL draft is trying to express is
nothing more or less than

  1. You must make your modified package output to the screen a message
     that it isn't Standard LaTeX.

  2. If the environment where your modified package is intended to be
     used provides a documented standard way of emitting such messages
     to the screen, you must use that.

I think it was a bad choice to try to word the clause in such a
general way that it is not apparent that the "validation mechanism" it
speaks about was only intended to cover these cases. Clearly a license
would be non-free if it required modified versions to use a mechanism
that did anything else than output a message on an output channel that
is not intended for machine interpretation.

Fortunately, as Jeff stated, nothing is cast in concrete yet, and
there is still time to make the wording better.

> > I've CC'ed this to a LaTeX person - any comments from the LaTeX crowd?

I've removed the Cc again - Frank did read debian-legal the last time
the LPPL was discussed, so I assume he is still (or again) subscribed.

-- 
Henning Makholm               "Hele toget raslede imens Sjælland fór forbi."