KOMA-Script packaging and license issues

[frank@debian.org (Frank Küster)]

Dear MikTeX team,

I have heard that you were having a discussion with Markus Kohm, the
author of KOMA-Script which is distributed with MikTeX. As I read in

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=10783&atid=110783&func=detail&aid=884037

you are unwilling to follow the authors recommendation for distributing
his LaTeX packages. Because of this, Markus has announced that he will
change the licensing of KOMA-Script in order to force you to either
distribute KOMA-Script in the form he requires or not distribute it at
all. And he is even thinking about not using the LPPL any more at all.

I think this would be not only bad for users of KOMA-Script and bad for
other distributors who work on packaging TeX-related software, but also
a bad signal for the free software community. As one of the maintainers
of the teTeX packages in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, I would like
to urge you to think your decision over.

I am generally worried about keeping TeX-related software free, and
about distributors following the intent of software authors. But I would
also like to make some remarks to this particular case:

- You said the reason for shipping the german documenation only with the
  packed sources was that you want to save disk space. However, with the
  new license Markus plans, you, and also all other distributors like
  Thomas Esser and Linux distributions, will be forced to distribute the
  whole sources unpacked, including dtx files. This will in fact
  increase the space needed. The other option would be to not distribute
  KOMA-Script at all - which is a strange way to save disk space.

- The english documenation of KOMA-Script is bad compared to the german
  version, from a point of view of language, readability, and
  clarity. This is because of the lack of contributors with sufficient
  knowledge of the english language. AFAIK it's even sometimes out of
  date. Anybody  who has only moderate knowledge of german will prefer
  the german version.

- Furthermore, for historical reasons (and because of the lack of
  convincing non-german documentation), most users of KOMA-Script are in
  fact german-speaking.

I would very much appreciate if you would consider to follow the authors
intent and ship scrguide as the standard documentation of KOMA-Script.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie