(Please CC me on answers: I'm not a member of debian-legal.) On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Frank Mittelbach wrote: > Concern 1: requiring a change of filename in case of modification > in case of distribution > ================================================================= > > this seems to me the major stumbling point for most people and > (unfortunately the most important point for us) I believe the only way to rethink this is this quote, from <http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses>: The LaTeX Project Public License [...] The reason this requirement is acceptable for LaTeX is that LaTeX has a facility to allow you to map file names, to specify ``use file bar when file foo is requested''. With this facility, the requirement is merely annoying; without the facility, the same requirement would be a serious obstacle, and we would have to conclude it makes the program non-free. Without this, even FSF and RMS would have not classified LPPL 1.2 as a free software license. So Frank, please mention this everywhere you want to prove LPPL is a Free Software license. For debian people: please consider this. I believe this voids many of the intents of the license, as previously mentioned (sysadmins can use this remapping feature to make \documentclass{article} load some other file instead of 'article.cls'), but this is also the reason FSF agreed that it is a free software license. > Argument 3.2: Trademarks and certification marks are tools better suited to > controlling endorsements of conformance with a standard or set > of usage practices. I agree. I still believe that TeX's copyright is a trademark and a software license combined. He could not have said: "Don't use the name TeX if you change this file", if there was not a trade mark on the names TeX, METAFONT, etc (I don't know the exact situation about Knuth's other programs distributed with Debian, like Computer Modern fonts). roozbeh