Bug#218105: Some license questions about your packages

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Dear Donald,

first of all let me thank you for contributing so many little and
not-so-little packages to the LaTeX community.  I've done a license
auditing of teTeX and TeXLive in the last months (or rather I'm still
doing it), and it's quite impressing to see to how many files you have
contributed.  And I also think it's a good approach to put even small
hacks into a style file and publish it on CTAN, instead of letting
people find them only on Google.

Anyway, there's also a problem: A couple of the files of yours do not
have any license information, and some could well get a better wording.
Unfortunately, people are pickier about this these days, especially
Debian folks, but also TeXLive people.

Would it be possible that you update the license information for these
files?  If you can't afford the time, I'd offer to upload changed files
if you request me to do so.

Here's a list of files in which I didn't find any license statement:

      chapterbib.sty
      tabls.sty
      version.sty: not only by you
      selectp.sty
      conditionals.sty: not only by you
      excludeonly.sty: not only by you
      placeins.tex
      tabto.tex
      underscore.sty

There is also one file, shapepar.sty, that forbids commercial use - this
would exclude it from TeXLive which is also sold, e.g. by Lehmanns in
Germany. 

Then there is one file, varwidth.sty, that is labelled as being under
LPPL, with no particular license version.  However there's an additional
sentence explaining what this "essentially" means.  This explanation was
correct for LPPL 1.0, but isn't correct for 1.3.  Therefore it's unclear
to me whether you meant it to be under old LPPL only, or whether this
explanation has no "legal" character.  If the latter is the case, I'd
suggest to add a "version <foo> or later" and simply drop the
explanation, it might become outdated again.

Finally there are many files labelled as "public domain" or similar.
However, public domain is a concept that doesn't exist in many
jurisdictions, and I've been told that it has partly been abandoned even
in the US.  Therefore just saying "these macros are in the public
domain" might be problematic in a global world, and it would be better
to replace it by "you may freely copy, distribute and/or modify this
file" as you did in some other places.  Here's the list of files:

      import.sty:    "this software is free of any restrictions"
      relsize.sty:   "public domain", nothing else
      braket.sty:    "This is free, unencumbered, unsupported software." 
      notoccite.sty: "unrestricted software contributed to the public domain"
      sansmath:      "public domain", nothing else
      titleref.sty:  "public domain", nothing else


Thank you very much for your patience,

Regards, Frank



-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)