On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 12:36:59AM +0200, Frank Mittelbach wrote: > single person is envolved. However the sysadmin case is on the other side of > the fence (sorry Nick to disappoint you, just saw your post :-) as it > typically means providing a "non-latex" under the label of "latex" to > unsuspecting users and depriving them of their expectation to get identical > documents. > > so in case of Nick's company example i would expect them to call their > modified latex company-latex or whatever, ie forking at kernel level and if > necessarily forking via the cfguide suggestion so that every file can be > changed easily individually if they want to change much. even more so in the > case of a sysadmin for an installation with varying number of people, eg in an > university or so. > > but i agree this may not be a distribution in legal sense and the wording may > have to change and closed groups should probably generally be exempt.
Take my company. There are 4 of us working there. I'm quite likely to want to make a small modification to some part of LaTeX to make it behave how I want it to. It's been a long time since I used LaTeX heavily, so I'm not likely to be terribly clued-ep up the "right" way to do things. Irrespective of the enforcibility of your deciding that I am distributing LaTeX when I install it for our use, I would argue that the constraints you mention under the current license draft make the LaTeX license clearly and categorically non-free in spirit. The question arises "at what point does it become reasonable to require a name change?" For example, in a larger environment (such as a University) it would clearly be good practise at the very least to make prominent the fact that our installation was non-standard. It would also be pretty inexcusably poor form not to have standard LaTeX available -- which implies that either I would have to learn the "right" way to do it, or make two distinct versions available. There is of course a fairly continuous spectrum of other situations between the two described above. I guess it really comes down to users' expectations, but this is not an area that is amenable to watertight wording. I do however think that if you manage to answer this question clearly and without ambiguity, then you may find that you have come up with a solution with wider applicability... Cheers, Nick -- Nick Phillips -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Don't worry. Life's too long. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
