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Subject:
From:
William F Hammond <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 16 Jul 2002 17:04:22 -0400
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Sorry I don't know the official name for "[log in to unmask]".
:-)

(And is it the case that one or both of these lists is filtering the
name of the other list from message headers?  IMO discussion on this
issue _should_ _be_ sent to both.)

Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]> forwards to LATEX-L
a message to debian-legal from Branden Robinson <[log in to unmask]>,
dated Tue, 16 Jul 2002 03:56:02 -0500:

> > the LATeX community understood as an important set of goals
>
> Uh, well, in that case I suggest drafting a Statement of Principles.
> The entire raison d'etre of a copyright license is to "enforce things
> legally".  Perhaps you should contrain the LPPL's scope to whatever ends
> you want to achieve with that means.

The major point is that both (1) LaTeX classes and (2) LaTeX
packages, as well as the associated literate programming wrappers and
"latex" itself, are _very_ _different_ animals from what is normally
called a program, i.e., a C program, a GNU Emacs Lisp program, ... .

Neither GPL nor GPPL makes much sense for LaTeX objects.

> > i understand that there are a large number of people (who work
> > with other type of free software) that do not like the fact that
> > we preserve some rights of the users of LaTeX
>
> Can you enumerate what rights of the user you are preserving by
> forbidding them from distributing modified files without changing the
> filename?

LaTeX users do not make such changes.  Something in document source
called "\newcommand" is the LaTeX user's way to customize.

Let's not confuse the LaTeX user with the person who changes a LaTeX
package without renaming it, thereby causing the user's 15 year
archive of LaTeX source to break.

> > It is certainly (a bit) more work to rename a file rather than to
> > simply change it, but while I concur with you that for stuff which
> > is essentially local to my environment this is fine (and thus
> > something like GPL or whatever is appropriate) for the benefit of
> > LaTeX as a freely extensible and changeable system for exchange of
> > information it is not.
>
> I hope you'll agree with me that this statement is a subjective
> analysis.

Isn't it rather a rather practical and pragmatic analysis based on
long experience?

Please work with Frank on this.

                                    -- Bill

William F. Hammond                   Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics
518-442-4625                                  The University at Albany
[log in to unmask]                      Albany, NY 12222 (U.S.A.)
http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/                Dept. FAX: 518-442-4731

Never trust an SGML/XML vendor whose web page is not valid HTML.
And always support affirmative action on behalf of the finite places.

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