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- To: Petr Olsak <petr@olsak.net>
- Subject: Fixing teTeX's license violation in Debian; new license for cs stuff?
- From: Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>
- Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 14:42:13 +0200
- Message-id: <86r71c142i.fsf@alhambra.kuesterei.ch>
Hi Petr,
I've got two questions regarding csTeX stuff. The first is: As
promised, I want to fix the license violation within Debian by updating
to the new version from CTAN. However, this is more work than I
thought, because the Debian package is based on the original teTeX
tarball plus diff.gz, and I will have to recreate the tarball. Since
I'll need to do that later, anyway, I'd rather postpone this solution.
As a short-term solution, is it possible to just take the three ini
files from the current version and install them along with the old files
already included in teTeX-3.0?
The second question: Have you come to a conclusion regarding the future
license of the cs stuff? As I understood it, you weren't aware of the
problems of your mixed license (GPL + renaming clause) and needed some
thinking (probably without being yelled at on the mailing lists...).
Just to rehash the legal problems: The GPL says explicitly (addressed
at "me", the distributor):
,----
| You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients'
| exercise of the rights granted herein.
`----
This means that I am not allowed to distribute a GPL'ed program with
further restrictions, like the renaming clause. But that has the effect
that nobody except you is allowed to distribute csplain (or derivative
works of it), since you distribute it with an additional clause: The
GPL requires me to drop it, but you license combination forbids it.
As I said previously, the LPPL gives you the protection you want in
terms of name changing. Why don't you just switch the licensing to
LPPL? Is the work of others included that you would have to ask first?
Thanks in advance, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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