On Jul 16, Boris Veytsman wrote: > To summarize: I think LPPL strikes a necessary balance between > standardization and flexibility. This balance was tested by 20+ years > of TeX, which is licensed under exactly same conditions.
I don't think anyone here has a problem with a license that says "If your LaTeX doesn't pass such and such a validation suite, you can't call it LaTeX, but you can do whatever else you want to do with it." I think the real issue is that the LaTeX project is trying to use its license to enforce a norm of good behavior by distributors that would be much better left to certification marks or a Knuthian statement that "if you break it, both pieces are yours and you are the one who will get bitched at, not us." I think that's being obfuscated behind Branden's establishment of hypotheticals that can be dealt with through \renewcommand and the like. I think Frank et al's concerns could be addressed fairly easily by requiring distributors of modified versions of the entire LaTeX suite to document the changes and include the location of that documentation in the diagnostic output of latex, and requiring distributors of modified versions of separately-distributed style/class files to do the same, with a waiver of the documentation requirement if the file/suite is renamed (thereby not misrepresenting the modified version as any longer being a substitute for the original). This certainly would pass the DFSG and would clearly inform users of what sort of LaTeX they're getting. For example, if I modify article.dtx, I must either rename it (thereby no longer calling it article.dtx) or include diagnostic output showing where on the local filesystem a file is that clearly documents the differences between article.dtx as distributed by the LaTeX3 project and my article.dtx (for example, "corrected typo in line 300 that stopped articles with fewer than 83 pages from having more than 17 footnotes".) Then again, maybe I'm missing the point :-) Chris -- Chris Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/
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