Thomas Bushnell, BSG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> Even if Debian is not violating the intended license directly, to base >> a stance on the viewpoint that the license is legally uninforcable and >> therefore irrelevant seems rather disconcerting. > Are you worried that we would be violating it indirectly? I'm worried about the basis for decision-making that would be used, in a broader sense, and what potential slippery slopes it may lead into. I understand that legal exactness has to be used as a basis for legal decision-making. It just seems to me like when it comes to a question of policy, using exact legal readings as a way of working around a problematic licensing clause whose intent doesn't coincide with the exact legal reading is a bad approach. That's most of what I was trying to say. The questions of whether the license are acceptable are a separate issue to me; the main point that I feel strongly about is to evaluate the license on its own terms, rather than on the basis of whether it's worded so as to give people a legal out. > Note that DFSG-4 does not allow requiring he changing of *file names*, > but rather only the name of the *work*, which is a different matter--and > essentially so--since the name of the work is not a functional element. Yes. This is the fundamental question, namely whether the DFSG only allows requirements of changing names as a way to handle what are in essence marketing issues (making sure the user knows they have a modified package), or whether it's permissable to protect APIs this way. (In essence, that's what we're talking about with TeX fonts and with LaTeX packages. The name of the package and the name of the font are an element in the TeX API, and if you change them, you have to change the document to reflect that change, exactly as if you changed an API in a library.) Knuth clearly is attempting to protect an API. The whole reason why he feels so strongly about this is because he wants to be able to take a TeX document and process it with a TeX system 50 years from now and get the exact same result down to the word wrapping, and in order to do that, he has to be sure that when one uses the standard API for the TeX system, the results will be identical as when one used that standard API twenty years earlier on a completely different system. My personal belief, for whatever it's worth, is that this is so borderline as to almost require the nature of the language be taken into account; if changing the calls to fit a new API requires a lot of work, that's different than changing a line in the prelude of a document. I can both understand Knuth's concern and understand the concern from the direction of supporting modification and redistribution, and it's hard to find the right balance, particularly when we're talking about reproducibility of written work rather than software. Written works don't change in the same ways and for the same reasons as software packages. But my basic point here is not to so much get into all of that as it is to say that I think that fundamental question needs to be addressed according to the intentions of the original author, regardless of the precise wording of the license. > You seem to be suddenly entering this as if you were totally unaware of > the preceding controversy. I would suggest you go to the mailing list > archives and review the discussion. I'm aware of the basic issues and have followed this exact argument a few times through from different angles; what you're probably picking up on is that I didn't follow the immediately previous Debian discussion before the recent threads. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
