Thomas Bushnell, BSG writes: > Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]> writes: > > > i think so yes, for example, Don's home page > > other may be able to refer you to more explicit quotes. > > Knuth's home page is large. Do you have a specific reference? sorry, seems i have thrown you a red herring myself. His intentions seem to be only briefly touched at on his home page (the reference to TeX gets absolutely frozen upon his death is there but not much more) i took the effort (though i think this is a different discussion therefore finally changed the subject) to try and pin down some references. best i was able to do is @Article{Knuth:TB11-4-489, author = "Donald E. Knuth", title = "{The future of {\TeX} and {\MF}}", journal = j-TUGboat, volume = "11", number = "4", pages = "489--489", month = nov, year = "1990", ISSN = "0896-3207", bibdate = "Wed Jul 18 18:33:43 MDT 2001", bibsource = "ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/tugboat.bib; http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/index-table-t.html#tugboat", acknowledgement = ack-bnb # " and " # ack-nhfb, } in there he say (beside other things): As stated on the copyright pages of Volumes B, D, and E, anybody can make use of my programs in whatever way they wish as long as they do not use the names TeX, METAFONT, or Computer Modern. The copyright page of volume B then says: The progam for TeX is in the public domain and readers may freely incorporate the algorithms of this book into their own programs. However, the use of the name TeX is restricted to software systems that agree exactly with the program presented here. that seems to me more than trip test complience. while I'm at it, the copyright page for volume E is similar and states that any font named cmr10 (and so on) has to be fully compatible with the one produced from the programs in the book. Now i'm not saything this is legally inforcable the way he said it (i have no idea), for TeX there is a trademark, though for Computer Modern there is probably none (definitely not for the 72 individual font names. Nevertheless Debian wouldn't get a good press if it would generate modified versions of such programs and fonts and distributed them under the original names. frank