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Subject:
From:
Lars Hellström <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 3 Jul 2002 00:49:44 +0200
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At 16.52 +0200 2002-07-02, Mittelbach, Frank wrote:
>Lars wrote:
>
>>Concerning the matter of stating intent, perhaps something like the
>>following could be included in the preamble?
>
>possibly. some suggested addiotions/changes below
>
>>  The purpose of this License is to grant The User the right to
>>  freely obtain, use, and make derivative works based on The Program,
>>  whilst at the same time preserving the integrety of The Program.
>
>  ... integrety of The Program under its original name.
>
>>  This means that derivative works created by modifying The Program
>>  (or any part thereof) must not give the appearance of being part
>>  of The Program.
>
>perhaps the above sentence is actually not necessary

It all depends on how univocal we consider the term `integrety' to be. I
fear that it would not by itself be clear enough outside this discussion,
and I suspect the phrase "under its original name" would be of little help
in clarifying it. Furthermore, isn't the name by default part the
definition (as found in copyright statements, specifying what the license
applies to) of The Program? In that case, "under its original name" is at
best superfluous.

Maybe the paragraph in question should also contain the following sentences
to carify the situation:

  Derivative works which exhibit any degree of functional equivalence
  (or lack thereof) to The Program may be created, but such a derivative
  must be given a name that is distinct from that of The Program. These
  restrictions exist to protect other users from errors caused by
  automated processes confusing a derivative work with The Program proper.

At 19.32 +0200 2002-07-02, Frank Mittelbach wrote:
>I'm happy if somebody takes up the torch and gets (a variant of) LPPL approved
>by any such body. We tried in 2000 and the results where so frustrating and
>(in my personal opinion) unprofessional that I'm not willing to get personally
>involved into it again, at least not initially.

Are there any archives of that discussion?

>as an aside: which life is made unnecessarily complicated? I'm not aware of a
>single software project under LPPL which would really gain anything from
>living on something like Sourceforge. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be good
>if LPPL is approved, on the contrary, but i don't see Sourceforge and the like
>as a real practical argument.

I beg to disagree; any software project large enough would certainly
benefit from living on _something_ like SourceForge. I agree most projects
governed by the LPPL only have one developer and these would probably not
benefit from it, but as soon as the project becomes larger than what one
developer can effectively maintain you do get a problem. Experience has
shown that a centralised server somewhere that holds _the_ current version
of the project and which all developers can access over the internet
removes much of this problem. Presumably latex-project.org provides
something of the sort for the LaTeX project, but setting up a completely
new site seems to me as a bit of overkill for reasonably sized projects. It
ought to be more effective to use one of the generic services that are
currently available.

CTAN, for one thing, does not suffice as a development server. As its name
indicates, it's an archive. Putting things on it requires communicating
with and the manual intervention of the archive administrators, which means
you hardly ever upload anything you plan to continue working on tomorrow,
and that takes away much of the usefulness of the central development
server. Maybe CTAN can be complemented by a "development hotel" such as
SourceForge, but at least to me that sounds like more work than getting the
LPPL approved.

In case you want a concrete example of a project then I've got that as
well: fontinst. I have on occation considered suggesting setting up a
fontinst project at SF, but the fact that the LPPL isn't approved has
stopped from pursuing that possibility. (IMHO it is a major problem for
fontinst that there isn't such a central server, because it really has
become too large for any of the persons involved to maintain on one's own.
The only components I've ever effectively maintained is the DTXs from which
fontinst.sty is generated. The latin alphabet MTXs and ETXs would probably
be far better maintained by Walter Schmidt, since he is anyway their top
user due to PSNFSS. The cyrillic alphabet MTXs and ETXs should be part of
the fontinst distribution, but the author of those is Vladimir Volovich,
which means he is the logical maintainer. And so on. But I digress.) In
view of the recent discussion on why the LPPL is different from the GPL one
could of course draw the conclusion that fontinst should not (unlike most
LaTeX packages) be LPPLed, but I would prefer that it stayed under the
LPPL, if possible.

Lars Hellström

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