Bug#368968: tetex-base: License violation in csplain
Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:
> Package: tetex-base
> Version: 3.0-16bpo1
> Severity: serious
>
> As discussed on debian-legal and various upstream lists, the license of
> csplain requires that any derivative work be renamed. The version in
> teTeX-3.0 is such a derivative (created by TE) which has not been
> renamed, so this is a license violation.
>
> This can most conveniently fixed by updating to the current csplain
> upstream release, which fixes the problems TE's patch addressed and is,
> well, unmodified csplain.
I think I owe an explanation for the non-action. First of all, really
fixing this obviously requires repackaging the orig.tar.gz, and I would
like to do that together with all the nonfree-docs and other license
issues that have been discovered - but some are not yet settled.
Second, updating csplain will *not* fix this bug. csplain as well as
cslatex (and maybe some other things by the same author) are licensed
under "GPL plus a renaming clause". This doesn't work, because the GPL
forbids me (as a redistributor) to impose any additional restrictions,
while the original author requires me to do so (namely, add the renaming
clause). Consequently, these packages are not distributable at all.
However, this is not what the author intended. He doesn't care much
about licenses (and obviously didn't read the GPL carefully, just took
it as "the standard free license). He's stated publically that he
wanted csplain to be licensed the same way as plain TeX (what is that,
btw? see #218105), so he wants it distributable.
Some texlive people are currently trying to contact the author, and I'm
waiting for answers.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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