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

[Sam Geeraerts]

ben schreef:
> 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.

So if we'd have to rename directories there would be a problem. I assume 
that's not AMS' intention.

Renaming files wouldn't be a problem if AMS allows aliases and keeping 
the package ID. AFAICT, they do in the current wording, but the question 
is: is that also what they mean?

> 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.

I'm not sure I follow this. Does "a special exception" mean: "we kind of 
think it's not free, but we allow it anyway"? Anyway, probably not 
relevant to gNewSense.

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