Re: adding and forking someone else's GPL software - what should i do?

On Mon 21 Nov 2011 11:42:03 NZDT +1300, Daniel Pittman wrote:

> > It's actually not an unreasonable concern raised by Debain.

Yes it is, in this case.

> ...and, also, incompatible with the GPL.

And that matters one bit why? The TeX engine and computer modern fonts
are (C) American Mathematical Society (they paid for it) and they use
whatever license I don't remember and am not looking up now. These are
the Pascal-like sources that are translated to C before being compiled,
and the metafont sources. It was always a free open source license and
noone ever had a problem with it.

LaTeX, and the LaTeX macro packages, are released under whatever license
their authors chose. There also is only one namespace, and TeX/LaTeX is
probably the only documentation software where producing the same
document from the same inputs was a non-negotiable design requirement
(even OO is as shocking as MS Office, and we all know how often that
produces the same thing twice, especially when more than 2 days apart).

So changing name when making modifications is a really brilliant idea. I
don't recall anyone having a problem with that, except for a bunch of
jokers

> Most of the Debian concerns, though, are that they want to patch the
> software: their policy on security is that they will not ship a newer
> version for a security issue, but rather will make the minimal patch
> to their release version.

who are allowed to have whatever policy they want, but then start
screaming it's someone else's problem if they choose to be in their own
way.

> In the LaTeX case, of course, that means they are obligated to change
> the name of the package in the security release, breaking the entire
> world.  Boom.

We're talking about macro packages for typesetting here. The security
risk is about the same as that of some C source code turning someone's
gcc into a security problem. I don't recall someone's LaTeX document
being turned into a program and becoming a security issue... And neither
TeX nor gcc are really designed as or meant to be used as a secure
service.

Volker

-- 
Volker Kuhlmann			is list0570 with the domain in header.
http://volker.dnsalias.net/	Please do not CC list postings to me.

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