[l2h] Maintenance of latex2html

[Ross Moore]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Roland Stigge wrote:

> Hi Ross,
>
> thanks for your detailed mail.

You're welcome.

>
>
> Thanks for pointing out clause D. But consider the following.
>
> Imagine the extreme (yet possible) case of a distribution including just
> packages all of which have a license like latex2html (currently). The
> DFSG require the possibility of selling the aggregate software
> distribution. Even with your liberal interpretation, every package
> claims (D and B) that the "fee" would effectively be for the rest of the
> aggregation. But there's nothing left to assign that "fee".

Well, I'm quite happy to have a license forbid this scenario.

If someone has just copied other people's software, and has not even
provided installation routines, nor *anything at all* that adds value
to the collection more than the sum of the free pieces, then he/she
has no moral right to charge for this, apart from the 'nominal'
amount mentioned previously.

I'm a teacher (university lecturer) --- any student doing just this
for a project would receive a failing grade. It's very close to
out-and-out plagiarism, so cannot be countenanced.
I find it hard to believe that Debian really regards this as an
acceptable scenario, and would drop a package on that basis.


> > To make this clearer, perhaps clause B could be extended with a similar
> > statement about aggregations, as appears in D ?
> >
> > Alternatively, would it be sufficient to simply remove the adjective
> > `nominal' ?
>
> Unfortunately, both these suggestions won't meet our requirements, IMHO.
> I suggest removing clause B as a whole. We (Debian) would have a problem
> with _both_ of the included sentences.
>
> Instead, I suggest the complete removal of clause B. That would be the
> final move to make latex2html DFSG-compliant.

That's too much to remove; I cannot do that.

>
> Alternatively, consider the adoption of an OSI-approved license as
> suggested by Michael Chapman (and me, previously).

Many of the files in the LaTeX2HTML distribution are already under the
GPL, so it may be acceptable to Nikos to put it all under this.
But then other developers would have to be contacted too.


> > DFSG 3 states:
> > [...]
> > DFSG 4 states:
> > [...]
>
> These issues were resolved by the fact that the author of floatflt.ins
> (Mats Dahlgren) agreed to release his file under the LPPL. They were not
> related to the rest of the package (see bugs.debian.org/204684).

OK; that's good to hear.

>
> Feel free to change floatflt.ins in the main latex2html package
> accordingly.

In fact floatflt.ins does not need to be distributed with LaTeX2HTML.
It is no longer used in the documentation and floatflt.dtx was not
also included; so it was just an oversight that the .ins file was still
part of the distribution. It has now been removed from the MANIFEST.


> When the licensing issue is resolved (which is most important to
> consider for the next Debian release), I'll come back with an assorted
> list of bugs where I depend on your help. You are definitely not
> responsible for all the bugs listed at Debian.
>

I have a fix for the reported difficulty with \includegraphics
on .jpg (and .png ?) images:
   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=183372

It's not committed to the repository yet.


> > > It being at least _possible_ to charge $200 is exactly what Debian
> > > requires from Free Software. Besides the GPL, please consider the LPPL
> > > or any other free license approved at
> > > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/.
> >
> > I believe it is possible to do this, with an aggregation of software
> > packages, which is all that Debian requires, right ?
>
> See above.

We are not in agreement yet.

All the best

	Ross


>
> Thanks for your involvement.
>
> bye,
>   Roland
>