claire connelly suggests, with respect to the lppl permitting substitution of a new maintainer for one who has "disappeared", If what we're concerned about here is someone ``hijacking'' a particular package, then it might make more sense to define some restrictions on uploading to CTAN and leaving the license such that anyone can modify the package and make it available somewhere else. no, please, no. anyone *can* now modify a package as long as they change the name. the purpose of the restriction is to guarantee reproducibility. the ams already struggles with material submitted by authors that uses old versions of "standard" packages. it adds a great deal of time and cost to producing our publications. but at least we are generally certain that no one has made unexpected changes, and can usually trace through the history to see what might be causing problems. if we can't be sure that authors are using standard (even if obsolete) versions of packages, that will only increase our cost and headaches. if file names aren't changed when a modified file is installed on a shared system (as are the norm at many universities), most users won't even know they're not using the standard version. CTAN could be (and is, I thought) regarded as the ``official repository'' of TeX/LaTeX packages, and might require a higher standard of proof before allowing someone other than the original author to upload a changed version of a package. [...] yes, we regard ctan as the trusted source for packages, but if someone already has a particular package available locally, that person isn't going to go to ctan to get a new copy. That way the LPPL could be a very free license while still preserving an official TeX source tree with a significant level of sanity checking. ... not enough sanity, unfortunately. ... If the changes were too great to allow complete backwards compatibility, the CTAN maintainers could enforce a name change on the package (while at the same time recommending the newer package with a note in the CTAN Catalogue or similar). the ctan maintainers don't have time to do this level of chacking. i suspect they do make a cursory check on the "ownership" of a package before posting, but actually testing it is out of the question. the problem of "disappearing" authors is real (though not always their fault), and i'd love to see something in the license to get around the problem. but opening things up so that changes can be made to copies not on ctan isn't the answer. I don't think that the license has to assume that anyone making changes is up to no good and restrict people's ability to make those changes or to make those changes available in some form. At the moment, the LPPL doesn't prevent an original author from making significant changes to their package that break backwards compatibility or even completely change its functionality. i don't think there *is* any assumption that someone making changes is up to no good. i think that reproducibility is the only important assumption in this regard. if the original author does make incompatible changes, then s/he will be faced with deserved slings and arrows. On a related note, if CTAN, the LaTeX Project, TUG, or one of the European user groups could provide the resources for a centralized bug-tracking system that all CTAN authors could use, such a system could be a very valuable way to keep track of problems, fixes, and even the activity and availability of authors. (I'm thinking, of course, of Debian's BTS (bugs.debian.org), which tracks an enormous amount of information without being especially complicated.) this is a good idea. -- bb