[tex-hyphen] LPPL and changing files

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Sat Jan 23 01:29:14 CET 2016


On 1/23/2016 1:16 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a (somewhat theoretical) question.
>
> When we first changed files back in 2008 we renamed all files, so that
> was probably OK even by LPPL standards. Now assume the following
> scenario:
>
> - we made the initial changes and renamed the files to hyph-xy.tex
> - then the original author made some further functional changes to
> hyph-xy.tex in the meantime and sent them to us, we included his
> latest version of the file, still licenced under LPPL
> - we now want to do further modifications (not changing the patterns
> functionally, just completely reformatting everything, reorganizing
> comments, ...)
>
> It's not clear to me what LPPL says about that scenario. I mean: does
> [strictly speaking] the LPPL licence require from us to mark further
> modifications as derived work (with all the extra work and
> consequences like potentially having to rename the files etc.)?
>
> I'm not asking about common sense, but about "worst case" that the
> licence is asking from us.
>
> I don't want to be formally responsible for the contents of patterns
> and I don't think it's fair to list myself as the co-author if all I'm
> doing is just data collection and some basic maintenance. On the other
> hand we are maintainers of those files in some sense, so the absence
> of being listed as the author should not prevent us from changing
> files. But LPPL rules are not really clear to me in that respect.

as you are doing a coordinated effort in the context of the main tex 
distribution you can probably assume that most authors are happy to have 
delegated the packaging, checking, preparation to you, so maybe you're 
not making the derived work but the 'final work' using data supplied by 
others (data that would otherwise be rather useless and not used in 
macro packages) ... i think the somewhat strict licenses like lppl are 
mostly to protect work derived from originals to be messed up in ways 
that bleed back into distributions thereby introducing a support issue

imo that is also one of the main tasks for user groups (and projects 
like this): make sure that stuff got packaged right; i doubt if there is 
any author who would object to your repackaging esp because it makes the 
patterns useable

Hans


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