Re: [gNewSense-users] unclear licence of AMSLatex (fwd)

[ben]

Frank Kuester, the maintainer of the Debian texlive-base package,
clarified some things in a comment to the Debian bug report (#477060):

Sorry, I don't have time to subscribe and really join in. Just two
points:

- With respect to the question of softlinks: All kpathsea-based systems
  (that's at least TeXLive and its Mac relatives, I don't know about
  MikTeX) support an alias file.  This allows you to load
  amsfoo-renamed.cls if amsfoo.cls is requested.  LaTeX, however, will
  still complain that the wrong package has been loaded *if* the package
  identification in \ProvidesPackage has been changed.

  Therefore, IMHO, the wording of the LPPL does make sense to preserve
  file integrity, but the "Knuth wording" used by AMS does not; the mere
  requirement to change the filename is moot.

- In all systems following the TDS, path does matter, and moving a file
  from $TEXMF/tex/latex/ams/ to $TEXMF/myengine/latex/ams/ will make it
  inaccessible for LaTeX in a usual setup.

All in all, since Debian has a special exception to allow software that
requires renaming of modified files, I don't care much whether the
licensor does it "properly" (like using the LPPL) or naively.

Regards, Frank

-- Dr. Frank Küster Debian Developer (TeXLive) VCD
Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg, ADFC Miltenberg B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg