Dear Lars,
Please let me apologize for taking so much time to get back to you. I
have now prepared a tarball[1] of the ae package relicensed under the LaTeX
Project Public License, as we discussed in September and October 2006.
What I have done precisely is the following:
- I added a file called MANIFEST that contains the list of files the
ae package consists of. This list of files is what defines "the
Work" when applying the LaTeX Project Public License to the ae
package.
This list was obtained with the following command (typed from the
base directory of the ae package):
find . -type f | sed -e 's@^\./@@'
If you add or remove any file from the distribution, you should
update the list in MANIFEST.
- I replaced the text of the GNU GPL in the file COPYING with the text
of the current version of the LPPL (version 1.3c, 2006-05-20).
- In README, I added the following paragraph:
Licensing terms
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This work is distributed under the conditions of the LaTeX Project Public
License, either version 1.3 or (at your option) any later version. Please
refer to the file COPYING for details.
I also changed your (presumably old) address from enge@nada.kth.se
to lars@engebretsen.se, since it seems to be the correct way to
reach you these days. Finally, I updated the date at the end of
README to 2007-04-20.
- In the src and tex directories, I added a copyright notice and
licensing statement as follows, at the beginning of every
non-trivial file:
%% ae.sty
%% Copyright 1997-2001 Rolf Niepraschk, Gilbert Ritschard, Lars Engebretsen
%
% This work may be distributed and/or modified under the
% conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3
% of this license or (at your option) any later version.
% The latest version of this license is in
% http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt
% and version 1.3 or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX
% version 2005/12/01 or later.
%
% This work has the LPPL maintenance status `maintained'.
%
% The Current Maintainer of this work is Lars Engebretsen.
%
% This work consists of all files listed in MANIFEST.
%
As you can see, these copyright notices state the names of the
copyright holders and the years where "the work was authored and/or
last substantially modified" (quoting the LPPL).
Of course, I don't have enough information to fill this accurately
for every file of the ae package. I did my best to put something
sensible, using the information in each file (declarations in
\author commands, for instance), in the README and, when I couldn't
find any date for a given file, using its date as distributed in the
ae.zip I downloaded from CTAN. When I couldn't find any information
on the copyright holders for a given file, I assumed you were the
only copyright holder.
If you can correct some of these copyright notices, please do so
(the copyright notice is the line that says
"Copyright <years> <authors>").
Note: as far as I know, an author and a year in a copyright notice
must be added only if the modifications are copyrightable
(non-trivial).
- I didn't modify any file in the tfm and vf directories, because:
(1) it seems they are all generated from files in tex and src;
(2) they are in binary format and maybe cannot even embed a
copyright notice and licensing statement.
- I think some files in the src directory were generated with fontinst
(.mtx files) but I added the copyright notice and licensing
statement anyway. Maybe for such files, the copyright attribution
should go to the fontinst authors, I'm not sure: the case of
generated files is a bit complicated. I'd say that, how they should
be licensed depends on the licensing details of fontinst and where
the "creative parts" in these files comes from (either from
fontinst, or from you input files, or from both). Hmmmpf...
- I made sure all files have decent Unix permissions before creating
the .zip file.
I did *not* bump any version number nor change any date except the date
at the end of the README file. I think it's your call to decide whether
you think this relicensing should change the ae version number.
Personally, I think it would be clearer to release the new package as
version 1.4a, but since no functionality changed since version 1.4, it's
probably not mandatory.
Again, thank you very much for your cooperation. I also want to thank
again the other copyright holders who gave their permission promptly for
this relicensing.
Please upload the new .zip file to CTAN so that we can eventually have a
nice licensing of ae. Feel free to ask me if you have any question.
Regards,
[1] Actually, I'm attaching a .zip file, because it is the format I
got ae in when I downloaded it from CTAN. I can provide a .tar.gz
file at your convenience.
--
Florent, on behalf of the Debian TeX maintainers