[tex-live] EC license

Alexander Cherepanov cherepan at mccme.ru
Fri Aug 28 22:18:43 CEST 2009


Hi Robin!
On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:34:00 +0100, Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>> While looking into licensing of LH fonts I stumbled upon a license for 
>> EC fonts parts of which are included in LH. copyrite.txt in the
>> distribution of EC fonts contain a custom license similar in spirit to 
>> LPPL but not equivalent to it (it predates LPPL).

> similar in spirit to the licence quoted for latex at the time the ec
> fonts were finally delivered -- 

That's even better. It makes changing the license to LPPL more logical 
and, hopefully, more likely.

> a licence spec which owes a lot to don.

As most things in tex world do:-)

>> One of the obnoxious 
>> clauses (but not the only one) is a restriction for renaming:
>> 
>>  * The names of the modified fonts must not start with the two letters
>>    `ec' or `tc'.
>> 
>> It's broader than that of ukhyphen.tex which was removed because of 
>> it, right? (Topic about ukhyphen.tex :
>> http://www.tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2006-May/thread.html#10224 .)
>> 
>> OTOH rsync://rsync.tex.ac.uk/CTANcatalogue/entries/e/ec.xml contains:
>> 
>>   <license type='lppl'/>

> (on the whole, it would have been better if you hadn't mentioned that
> rsync access to repository on an open archived list.  i have suppressed
> it.)

Not sure what's the problem but sorry for that.

Where is the official home for sources of tex catalogue then? The main 
page (e.g., 
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html ) points 
to http://sarovar.org/projects/texcatalogue/ but last update there 
seems to be from 2006-09-27. Or did I miss something?

>> This looks like an error.

> though the file has me as its most recent editor, i can see no entry in
> the svn log that says i actually gave it that licence.  since i don't
> mention the readme in the catalogue entry, i suspect i've never actually

(Probably copyrite.txt, not readme.)

> read it before this evening :-( (you'll note that there's no mention of
> the readme in the repository -- you can still see that through html
> translations.)

You mean notes like that:

  <license type='lppl' checked='2006-04-25' username='frank'
  version='2e' file='legal.txt'/>

(from latex.xml).

How can I see it through html?

>> And http://wiki.debian.org/ProblematicCtanPackages lists it among "Less 
>> serious problems":
>> 
>>   EC fonts: strange license wording, asked Karl Berry to contact Jörg
>>   Knappen, the author
>> 
>> Was there any progress on the issue?

> note that joerg's fc fonts (latin-alike alphabets for african languages)

Thanks, I forgot about it.

> are gpl2.  this is straightforward, whereas what the readme in ec says
> doesn't feel coherent ... sort of trying to sound strict without quite
> thinking it all through from the start.

Yes, it's quite strong. Unfortunely this means that the license for LH 
fonts can not be changed to bare LPPL.

Alexander Cherepanov




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