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Bug#360095: Question regarding you good old endfloat package



Dear Mr. Goldberg,

I'm contacting you as the author of the endfloat LaTeX package, long
ago.  I'm still using it, in fact (currently for a submission to
Biochemistry), and it works great.

I'm not only a user, but also a developer involved in creating the
TeXLive collection, and teTeX installation packages for Debian/GNU
Linux, and that's the reason why I'm writing to you.  You've published
endfloat with the following words:

,----
| The usual General Public Software License Agreement (version 2 or later)
| applies:  You can copy it freely, but you can't restrict other's rights to it.
| If you distributed it, you should make the source available
| (the .dtx file, the .ins file and this file).
| If you change it, change the name and take credit/blame for
| your changes.
`----

As you might know, people are much pickier about licenses these days,
and I must admit that this one grieves us - it's worded very badly:

- there's no "General Public Software License Agreement", probably you
  meant the GNU General Public License

- The GNU GPL does *not* require renaming the file, that's what the
  LPPL, the LaTeX Project Public License, did (and still does in most
  circumstances).

Therefore it is not clear which license you intended, and unfortunately
in copyright law this means that we can't assume to have any rights to
distribute, use or modify the code.  I trust that you won't sue me in
court, but in fact it has happened that individuals lost a lawsuit and
found all their intellectual property in the hands of some company,
e.g. a former employer.  Or similar things.

Therefore I'd be grateful if you could take the time and declare whether
you want to release it under the GPL, LPPl, or something else.  I'd also
offer to add your statement to the readme file and do the upload to CTAN
for you if you prefer.

Many thanks in advance, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)

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