[tex-live] license violation in tetex-texmf-3.0 fixed

[David Kastrup]

Petr Olsak <petr at olsak.net> writes:

> On Sat, 27 May 2006, Karl Berry wrote:
>
>>     perhaps csplain should just be dropped from texlive ...
>>
>> At present, I see no overriding reason why cstex can't be included in
>> tl.  Fundamentally, I don't think Petr's name restriction makes cstex
>> nonfree any more than Knuth's name restriction makes hyphen.tex nonfree.
>
> Yes, I mean that if csplain is marked as "nonfree" then plain.tex is
> "nonfree" too (independently, what "nonfree" means).

Your license has more terms, and contradictory terms, to boot
(according to the initial assessment of the main author of the
license).  That means that modification, and possibly no distribution
are allowed.

> If somebody want to make *TeX package without "nonfree" parts, then
> he have to remove TeX itself (it was done for example in teTeX+TL)
> and plain.tex, hyphen.tex and CM fonts.

To be brutally honest: csplain is not important enough to most users
to make compromises for a patched-together license which likely does
not allow modification at all without violating some license term.

> On the other hand, if somebody remove csplain but does not remove
> plain.tex then I'll ask: why? Where is difference between plain.tex
> and csplain license?

The pseudo-GPL hickhack in it.

> First, I agree with other discussants that my copyright notice in
> csplain.tex is confusing because I (sadly) used the pointer to GPL.
> I was more inspired by Knuth's license than GPL.  It means I feel my
> own responsibility to users and I want to have hight control over
> functionality of software with the same name as my original software
> in my computer.

Reality check: people wanting to maintain a Czech TeX variant are not
exactly battering down the doors.  As long as you keep actively
maintaining it, no hostile takeover is to be expected.

> Status/license of derived software: you can rename my project name
> and you can do with this result anything.  You can use arbitrary
> license for this derived software and you can totally forget about
> author of original.

Most certainly the pseudo-GPL would not allow anything like that.  The
GPL is _designed_ to prohibit derivations under different licenses.

Anyway, if one could "totally forget about author of original", one
could also rename fudgesquareplain.tex to csplain.tex (because one
might find the name more suitable)...

See the problem?

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum