Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Another tex package (texlive-base) to hack

[Benedikt Ahrens]

Hello,

I finally received an answer to my request to the AMS. Their licensing will be 
unified. I think that the issue is a bit similar to the Mozilla story: it is 
more a question of trademark than of copyright. Modified versions may not carry 
the same file name (which is also used as package name).

I won't be available during the next two weeks. The answer came from

"David M. Jones" <address@hidden>,

in case you want to continue the conversation.


Greetings
ben

(******************************)

Dear Benedikt,

The good news is that as we release new versions of our packages, we
have been updating the license to the following:

    % Unlimited copying and redistribution of this file are permitted as
    % long as this file is not modified.  Modifications, and distribution
    % of modified versions, are permitted, but only if the resulting file
    % is renamed.

We considered adopting the LPPL, but decided that the ban against
distributed modified files under the same name was critical to our
business interests.  This wording, which was suggested by Karl Berry
to address similar licensing concerns for TeXLive, will be used for
all future releases.

The new wording has already been applied to the following
distributions:

1) AMSFonts v3 -- released last month.  (The Type 1 font files are
   released under the SIL OFL, btw.)

2) The core AMS document classes (amsart.cls, amsbook.cls, and
   amsproc.cls) -- there was a minor maintenance release last month.
   Some of the related files may still have the old license.

3) AMSrefs

The bad news is that we still have not had occasion to update the core
amsmath package and related files.  We hope to release an upgrade of
amsmath at the end of this year or early next year, but I'm not in a
position to make any hard promises.

What we could do, if it would help, is add a 00LICENSE file to the
current distribution that contains the new license, an explanation of
the situation, and a statement that this supersedes the one in the
individual files.  I suspect that strictly speaking this is legally
dicey, but it would certainly make our intentions clear.

I hope that this is, if not completely satisfactory, at least
workable.  If you have any further questions or concerns, please let
me know and I'll do my best to address them.

Best wishes,
David M. Jones
Publications Technical Specialist
American Mathematical Society
http://www.ams.org/

> Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:41:17 +0200
> From: address@hidden
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: unclear licence of AMSLatex
>
> Dear AMSLatex team,
>
> this is a follow-up on a discussion in Debian's bug tracking system concerning
> the amslatex license [1]. This license is crucial for the decision whether
> amslatex will remain in the gNewSense distribution [2]
> or not.
>
> In [3] a clarification of the legal situation was announced, but as far as I
> was able to figure out, the situation has not changed since.
>
> Could you please give me some information about
> whether there will be a unified licensing for all the files included in
> amslatex,
> what this licence will be and
> when to expect these changes?
>
> Since amslatex is a very widespread package, its removal of the distribution
> would break a lot, and I hope this could be avoided.
>
> I thank you very much in advance.
> Kind regards,
> Benedikt
>
>
> [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477060
> [2] http://www.gnewsense.org
> [3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477060#20


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