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From: | Sam Geeraerts |
Subject: | Re: [gNewSense-users] unclear licence of AMSLatex (fwd) |
Date: | Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:20:33 +0200 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (X11/20090824) |
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
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