[tex-live] license violation in tetex-texmf-3.0 fixed

[Frank Küster]

Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>> > As David pointed out, you are not allowed by GPL to add any further
>> > restrictions. It is definitly unclear what license one has (and is
>> > allowed to) use for a derived work. I think this problem is also at the
>> > heart of RMS's comment on debian-legal where Thomas asked about this
>> > license. It is ok for a free software license to carry a renaming
>> > clause. But you cannot do this by adding restrictions on top of GPL. IMO
>> > this makes csplain etc non-free.
>> 
>> More like "non-sense", and in fact more in the category of inviting
>> misinterpretation by
>> referring to GPL which, as you note, forbids additional restrictions.
>
> it may not be sensible, but it caught both thomas and me, which was
> presumably the intent -- to mislead people into thinking it was
> actually gpl.

I don't think we should accuse the author of intentionally misleading
us.  I can see no reasons for that; instead he's stated that he just
doesn't care a lot about those legal things, and wanted to be sure to
not get bugreports baout unforked versions.  

Since the "You must provide sources" argument of the GPL is kind of moot
for TeX input files[1], I think he should be well served with the LPPL. 


Regards, Frank


[1] Of a GPL'ed work, you have the right to get the dtx sources if they
exist.  But this is probably unenforcable in practice, because anybody
unwilling to produce them might just as well tell you he has lost them
and continued to edit the *.sty/cls/tex files directly.
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)