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

[nobody]

Support Request #101040, was updated on 2002-Jul-02 13:18
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Category: None
Status: Closed
Priority: 5
Summary: LPPL possible for LaTeX-related project?

By: loic
Date: 2002-Jul-06 09:19

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Thanks to
http://www.latex-project.org/guides/modguide/modguide.html
and your explanations I now understand the rationale. 

In addition to the comments at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html, I think the
LPPL is
trying to define and enforce a distribution policy within
the license.
This is a strange idea. Imagine what mess it would be if the
Linux
kernel imposed the same restrictions on system calls ?-)
Instead a
specification was issued
(http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/) to
encourage the
necessary standardization and uniformity. Defining a standard
interface and behaviour is a complex matter that can hardly be
implemented by a license.

Savannah will not host a project under the LPPL. In my
understanding
nothing prevents you from releasing your project under the
GNU GPL.



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By: yeupou
Date: 2002-Jul-05 10:36

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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?

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