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Subject:
From:
Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 25 Jun 2002 19:39:41 +0200
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The LaTeX Project Public License is now in existence for some time and within
the TeX community widely accepted (or so is my impression), given the fact
that most packages these days are distributed under this license.

There are however voices (mostly in the debian community it seems) that
consider LPPL as "unfree" or at least a strange beast.

It is in fact true that LPPL is perhaps unnecessarily complicated in parts,
but when it was written we faced the following problem, for which we didn't at
the time find a good solution:

 - most latex software is distributed as source, eg .dtx + .ins files with the
   really important file, ie the .sty file being only implicitly part of the
   distribution.

 - therefore the .ins files usually write a copyright notice about LPPL into
   the generated files.

 - on the other hand it is not difficult at all to write your own version of
   of an .ins file (allowed if it has its own name) and this way generate .sty
   files with a different copyright.

To prevent this the license contains a (in my opinion) questionable statement:

 You may not modify in any way a file of The Program that bears a legal
 notice forbidding modification of that file.

So far, all people actually using the license have understand its intention
and how to interpret that statement together with the rest of the license, but
of course it is something that, if taken alone, would be clearly questionable
and in any case is an inferior way to go after the license goal, i.e., to
ensure that different sites can rely on exchangeability of documents, while
nevertheless to preserve the freedom to use the material "freely".

just recently i had another set of discussions of that type, and even though
(as in the past) nobody really came up with explicit faults or constructive
comments (unfortunately), I decided to tackle at least the shortcoming of the
part of the license that i personally feel is questionable.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|If there is anybody who knows about arguments that where never communicated  |
|to the LaTeX Project Team (which essentially any comment) on shortcomings in |
|the license, or reasons why people think it is no an open source license,    |
|please communicate them to us on this list  --- or to me directly            |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Our intention is and was to make the LPPL serve the community --- the reasons
why we think it is a good license are discussed in "modeguide.tex" in the
latex distribution.


Anyway, as i said i have made a stab at changing the license from 1.2 to
version 1.3 and would like to invite comments on that as well

best
frank


Index: lppl.txt
===================================================================
RCS file: /latex-project/cvs/latex2e/base/lppl.txt,v
retrieving revision 7.1
diff -c -r7.1 lppl.txt
*** lppl.txt    2001/09/19 21:00:29     7.1
--- lppl.txt    2002/06/25 17:14:20
***************
*** 2,10 ****
  The LaTeX Project Public License
  =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

! LPPL Version 1.2  1999-09-03

! Copyright 1999 LaTeX3 Project
      Everyone is allowed to distribute verbatim copies of this
      license document, but modification of it is not allowed.

--- 2,10 ----
  The LaTeX Project Public License
  =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

! LPPL Version 1.3  2002-06-12

! Copyright 1999,2002 LaTeX3 Project
      Everyone is allowed to distribute verbatim copies of this
      license document, but modification of it is not allowed.

***************
*** 55,63 ****
  You may distribute a complete, unmodified copy of The Program.
  Distribution of only part of The Program is not allowed.

- You may not modify in any way a file of The Program that bears a legal
- notice forbidding modification of that file.
-
  You may distribute a modified file of The Program if, and only if, the
  following eight conditions are met:

--- 55,60 ----
***************
*** 122,127 ****
--- 119,130 ----
  conventions of the target file systems) is considered to be a
  modification of the file.

+ If The Program is distributed in a packed form with a number of files
+ to be generated by some unpacking method from the distributed files,
+ then these derived files are logically (even if not physically
+ present) part of The Program and are covered by this license
+ independently of the method of their generation.
+
  The distribution conditions in this license do not have to be
  applied to files that have been modified in accordance with the
  above conditions.  Note, however, that Condition 7. does apply to
***************
*** 262,279 ****
    %% Copyright 2001 M. Y. Name
    %
    % This program may be distributed and/or modified under the
!   % conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.2
    % 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 1.2 or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX
!   % version 1999/12/01 or later.
    %
    % This program consists of the files pig.dtx and pig.ins

  Given such a notice and statement in a file, the conditions given in
  this license document would apply, with `The Program' referring to the
! two files `pig.dtx' and `pig.ins', and `The Copyright Holder' referring
  to the person `M. Y. Name'.


--- 265,284 ----
    %% Copyright 2001 M. Y. Name
    %
    % This program 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 2002/06/01 or later.
    %
    % This program consists of the files pig.dtx and pig.ins
+   % and the derived file pig.sty

  Given such a notice and statement in a file, the conditions given in
  this license document would apply, with `The Program' referring to the
! two files `pig.dtx', `pig.ins', and `pig.sty' (generateable from
! `pig.dtx' using `pig.ins'), and `The Copyright Holder' referring
  to the person `M. Y. Name'.

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