[tex-live] British hyphenation not freely distributable?

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Fri Jul 25 20:35:32 CEST 2003


    some lines below your quoted text, permission is granted to distribute this
    file. Still, this does not make it free software. The file disallows any
    modifications and this violates our rules.

The same is true for hyphen.tex.  hyphen.tex starts with:
% The Plain TeX hyphenation tables [NOT TO BE CHANGED IN ANY WAY!]

It doesn't even have the `This file of hyphenation patterns may be
freely distributed.' statement which ukhyph.tex does.

I interpret this as being under the same rules as plain.tex, tex.web,
and other files.  You're actually allowed to copy it to a new name and
make changes, you just can't edit it "in place" and distribute the
result with the same name.  This is obviously ok, or rms would never
have accepted TeX as free software in the first place.

My guess is that there are many other files with the same sort of
non-copyright.

Admittedly it would be better to spell it all out, but isn't it more
important that DEK work on volume 4?

k


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