Re: Where is bibunits.sty gone ?

Thorsten Hansen <[email protected]> writes:

> On Monday 10 May 2004 06:00 pm, Thomas Esser wrote:
> > On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 04:25:15PM +0200, Ronan KERYELL wrote:
> > > I'd like to use bibunits.sty but it looks like it is no longer in teTeX
> > > (well, at least the version 2.0.2-8 I have in Debian/unstable).
> > >
> > > Is it normal?
> >
> > You have to add it on your own. It has never been part of teTeX, IIRC.
> >
> > > Is there a licence problem somewhere?
> >
> > I could only find
> >
> >   Copyright (C) 1999--2004 by Thorsten Hansen. All rights reserved.
> >
> > which indeed is a problem. If that package gets a free software license,
> > thne I might add it...
> 
> I would greatly appreciate having bibunits integrated in your excellent
> distribution.
> 
> The copyright note is not a problem, since it does not restrict free 
> distribution.
> 
> bibunits is published under the The LaTeX Project Public License
> (LPPL).

But that does not mean that grabbing it somewhere off the net makes
it come under this licence: you can offer it under several different
licences.

In order to clarify the situation, you should add below the copyright
notice:

"bibunits.sty is licenced with the LaTeX Project Public Licence
 version 1.3, or at your option any later version.  You can find the
 licence file at ... if it is missing."

You can leave the "at your option" stuff out if you don't want to
trust the LaTeX Project to do the right thing in future, but it means
that people making use of your file in collections would then have to
gather permissions again.

And it would mean that if some incompatibilities between LPPL and DFSG
are discovered (cough, cough) that until such a licence update, your
software might get removed temporarily.

> Further, a copyright note can be found also in other packages
> distributed with teTeX, such as natbib v7.0:
>   
>   Copyright 1993-1999 Patrick W Daly

The copyright notice actually is _required_ for proper licensing.
Only the copyright holder can put a file under a licence, even a
Public Licence.

> To sum up: Please be so kind to add bibunits to your teTeX
> distribution. No worries about the copyright.

It would help a lot to avoid future confusion if you placed
appropriate notices into the file.  It is the only way that the
recipient, short of getting personal notice, can know what licence
the files are under.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum