[XeTeX] Performance of ucharclasses

Ross Moore ross.moore at mq.edu.au
Wed Oct 26 09:22:31 CEST 2011


Hi Keith, and others

On 26/10/2011, at 6:02 PM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:

> Hi Tobias, All,
> 
> This is getting a little OT, so please forgive.
> 
> For clarity, we have several issues at stake here.
> 
> 	1) Copyright
> 	     This will control distribution and the use thereof.
> 	      In our case we can use the package for creating texts.
> 	      We may distribute the unmodified code with our code!
> 	      But, the third party does not have the right to the package
> 	      as they wish without obtaining it themselves. 
> 	      For the legally minded this last point has plenty of dispute in it,
> 	      but depends on the exact license. 
> 	      Propriety Fonts are a good example.
> 
> 
> 	2) Intelectual Property Rights
> 	     This controls modification of code and use thereof.
> 	      In our case, the author discourages this, and basically
> 	      denies us the right to do it.
> 	      Just putting a wrapper around it or just changing a few
> 	      names or lines, making it more eficient will generally not
> 	      constitute a new idea or product.
> 	       This is a very hairy topic.
> 		Look, at the patent wars in the mobile phone market for
> 		examples!

There's hardly big bucks involved here.

If you think you can improve the performance of this package,
while retaining its overall structure, then the nicest way
to do it is to write a small "wrapper" package that requires
  ucharclass  and then patches some of its internal macros 
to work more efficiently.
Add extra features if you like.

Include comments internally about what you are doing and why;
perhaps including an offer to the original author to include
these "fixes" in an update, when he/she gets time to consider it.


This way your contribution is available to everyone, without
prejudicing whatever the original author wants to do with their 
own coding.

Also, the  ucharclass  package is pretty-much as visible to a user
as it was previously --- it still writes its own log-messages.

> 
> Mike should chime in here and clarify. He should also change his license to
> be more specific. 

I'd prefer the word 'could' to 'should' here.

Writing a useful package and putting it onto CTAN is doing
the community a free service.
There should be *no* obligation to provide more than the author
him/herself feels comfortable with.



> 
> regards
> 	Keith. 


My 2c worth.


Cheers

	Ross

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Ross Moore                                       ross.moore at mq.edu.au 
Mathematics Department                           office: E7A-419      
Macquarie University                             tel: +61 (0)2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia  2109                          fax: +61 (0)2 9850 8114
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