[Savannah-hackers] [ 101040 ] LPPL possible for LaTeX-related project?

[nobody]

Support Request #101040, was updated on 2002-Jul-02 15:18
You can respond by visiting: 
http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=detailsupport&support_id=101040&group_id=11

Category: None
Status: Open
Priority: 5
Summary: LPPL possible for LaTeX-related project?

By: yeupou
Date: 2002-Jul-05 12:36

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=1896
Browser: Links (2.1pre1; Linux 2.4.18-3 i586; x)

Personnally, I'm absolutely not conviced by thoses arguments.

For a reason or another, it could be usefull to modify a file and distribute it 
for a particular audience, without changing is name for compatibily reasons.

Those compatibilities reasons evoqued by the latex project seems to me 
nonsense: no one can forbid me to write a book.cls, from scratch, that would be 
incompatible with the standard book.cls.

But I think we should host LPPL files since the incompability with the GPL is 
not a major incompability: if we rename the file, we can do anything we could 
do with a GPL file. Renaming a file can be painy but it's possible to do in any 
case. So, in any case, if we what, we can do what we want in the GPL way with a 
LPPL file.

What do you think, Loic?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

By: oneiros
Date: 2002-Jul-05 12:15

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=8579
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-AT; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529

[Is it possible to get the changes to Support Requests by
e-mail too or is this system http-only?]

The problem for a LaTeX package with the GPL is that the GPL
allows modificiation of files (and distribution of modified
files) without renaming the files. But LaTeX documents load
packages by name, so when a user requests a package foo,
LaTeX searches for the file foo with a certain extension
(normally foo.sty). 

Users transmitting their input files to others (e.g.
publishers) expect that the packages used by their files
produce more or less the same result at the receivers end --
which is impossible if they or the receiver are using a
changed version of some package with the same name. 

The LaTeX project has written a detailed discussion about
their problems with the GPL and their reasons for the LPPL;
see http://www.latex-project.org/guides/modguide/modguide.html

The project I'm thinking about setting up at Savannah is the
pdfTeX interface for the LaTeX graphics subsystem. This is
used by the command \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} which
loads a file pdftex.def -- so users expect that their
pdftex.def behaves the same as the pdftex.def on most other
computers.

I hope I've made myself clear...

Best regards
   Martin

----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can respond by visiting: 
http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=detailsupport&support_id=101040&group_id=11