[tex-live] Contact to Donald Arseneau

[Karl Berry]

Hi Robin,

    shall i try asking?  

That would be great.

    if so, what exactly should i say?  

I think you should request that he use Frank's sentence 

  You may use, modify and/or distribute this file without restriction.

in preference to his various other versions at saying the same thing,
including the "public domain" statements, and inserting it into the
files where there is no statement.  Frank's original msg has the
specific file lists:
http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/attachments/20060904/208886ad/attachment.mht
  

Also, it would be very desirable to fix the license on shapepar.sty and
varwidth.sty (assuming he wishes to do so).

However, it would probably be good to wait to ask him anything until
Frank confirms the above.

    i note (from working on context stuff for the catalogue) that
    there's an fsf page outlining pd -- i presume that's reliable, so i
    guess i should read it.

The FSF page doesn't talk about the concerns Frank has raised.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#PublicDomainSoftware

There is a very long wikipedia page about it.  I got bogged down before
I could figure out if it said anything about our situation or not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

    there has been at least one attempt to explain the issue to knuth.  

Interesting.  But there are more important (IMHO) legal issues to ask
Knuth, like the strange license statement in tex.web vs. his statements
about TeX's legal status, etc.  Barbara has said that she has put this
on the list of things to bring up to him the next time he reviews TeX
"bugs".

    i think that, at the time, his world didn't encompass the concept
    people of ill will being involved with tex stuff (i wonder if the
    present increasing nastiness of the world at large has changed his
    mind?).
    
I don't see it as a matter of nastiness; I still haven't seen that
happen, in reality, but rather a matter of endless legal quibbling, ie,
free software/open source programmers having to turn into lawyers :(.
Which seems unavoidable.  All very depressing.

    don't know hobby.

I don't either, but as I recall, AT&T lawyers were involved in making MP
"public domain".  If that's so, I rather doubt it would be easy to change it.

Thanks,
Karl