Re: [l2h] Maintenance of latex2html
On Thursday 16 October 2003 2:12 am, Ross Moore wrote: OK; I've contacted Nikos and he is not averse to small changes in the license statement, provided that he gets to see them first, of course. I'd like to keep any such to be minimal, and without changing the intention of keeping the software `free' (in the GPL free-speech way, and as expressed on http://www.debian.org/intro/free/ . Hi, Apologies not so much for jumping in, but for seemingly jumping in pedanticly. The problem is in 'improving' standard wordings. I give a hypothetical example: The Int'l Convention on Protection of Prisoners says thou shalt not torture or abuse prisoners. Implementing this into national legislation for country-X the legislature decides to make it shall not torture, beat or abuse prisoners. This is done with the best of intentions. Then some bright spark says that beat was put there for a specific purpose, and that it must therefore be considered that 'mild knocking around' is excluded. It doesn't matter how stupid the suggestion is. It would require a court case in country-X to settle it. On the other hand, if someone tries to say the wording of the original Convention allows 'mild knocking around', then many countries, and the 'international community' are all going to chime in. I.e. If you can go with a classic wording go with it. If someone tries to misinterpret your wording who is going to fight your corner? If someone tries to misinterpret the GPL (or whatever) you should have some allies ... My suggestion would be: 1. Avoid editing the present wording at all costs! 2. Instead, adopt, either: A. latex2html may be used under the terms of the XYZ Licence. or B. latex2html may be used under the terms of the following Licence: [Here follows the Nikos Drakos original wording]; or, under the terms of the XYZ Licence; at the user's choice. Usual 'sad case' that I suspect that there is absolutely no disagreement within the community about the intention, just discussion about the best way of guarding the community against those with black hats outside Regards, Michael Chapman ___ latex2html mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/latex2html
Re: [l2h] Maintenance of latex2html
Roland Stigge wrote: At Debian, there are quite some latex2html bugs open [1], many of them upstream related, i.e. maybe interesting for the current primary latex2html maintainer. latex2html in Debian is almost useless for standalone documents, because of #183372. If the maintainer would care about his package he had resolved this bug immediately. Besides this the 2002 version is still not in sid. I wish you good luck resolving the licensing issues and really hope latex2html stays part of Debian. There are lots of things, which could be improved, but all in all it is a very useful, powerful and stable software. Jens ___ latex2html mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/latex2html
Re: [l2h] Maintenance of latex2html
On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Roland Stigge wrote: Hi Ross, thanks for your detailed mail. You're welcome. Thanks for pointing out clause D. But consider the following. Imagine the extreme (yet possible) case of a distribution including just packages all of which have a license like latex2html (currently). The DFSG require the possibility of selling the aggregate software distribution. Even with your liberal interpretation, every package claims (D and B) that the fee would effectively be for the rest of the aggregation. But there's nothing left to assign that fee. Well, I'm quite happy to have a license forbid this scenario. If someone has just copied other people's software, and has not even provided installation routines, nor *anything at all* that adds value to the collection more than the sum of the free pieces, then he/she has no moral right to charge for this, apart from the 'nominal' amount mentioned previously. I'm a teacher (university lecturer) --- any student doing just this for a project would receive a failing grade. It's very close to out-and-out plagiarism, so cannot be countenanced. I find it hard to believe that Debian really regards this as an acceptable scenario, and would drop a package on that basis. To make this clearer, perhaps clause B could be extended with a similar statement about aggregations, as appears in D ? Alternatively, would it be sufficient to simply remove the adjective `nominal' ? Unfortunately, both these suggestions won't meet our requirements, IMHO. I suggest removing clause B as a whole. We (Debian) would have a problem with _both_ of the included sentences. Instead, I suggest the complete removal of clause B. That would be the final move to make latex2html DFSG-compliant. That's too much to remove; I cannot do that. Alternatively, consider the adoption of an OSI-approved license as suggested by Michael Chapman (and me, previously). Many of the files in the LaTeX2HTML distribution are already under the GPL, so it may be acceptable to Nikos to put it all under this. But then other developers would have to be contacted too. DFSG 3 states: [...] DFSG 4 states: [...] These issues were resolved by the fact that the author of floatflt.ins (Mats Dahlgren) agreed to release his file under the LPPL. They were not related to the rest of the package (see bugs.debian.org/204684). OK; that's good to hear. Feel free to change floatflt.ins in the main latex2html package accordingly. In fact floatflt.ins does not need to be distributed with LaTeX2HTML. It is no longer used in the documentation and floatflt.dtx was not also included; so it was just an oversight that the .ins file was still part of the distribution. It has now been removed from the MANIFEST. When the licensing issue is resolved (which is most important to consider for the next Debian release), I'll come back with an assorted list of bugs where I depend on your help. You are definitely not responsible for all the bugs listed at Debian. I have a fix for the reported difficulty with \includegraphics on .jpg (and .png ?) images: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=183372 It's not committed to the repository yet. It being at least _possible_ to charge $200 is exactly what Debian requires from Free Software. Besides the GPL, please consider the LPPL or any other free license approved at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/. I believe it is possible to do this, with an aggregation of software packages, which is all that Debian requires, right ? See above. We are not in agreement yet. All the best Ross Thanks for your involvement. bye, Roland ___ latex2html mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/latex2html
Re: [l2h] Maintenance of latex2html
Hi Ross, On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 18:43, Ross Moore wrote: If someone has just copied other people's software, and has not even provided installation routines, nor *anything at all* that adds value to the collection more than the sum of the free pieces, then he/she has no moral right to charge for this, apart from the 'nominal' amount mentioned previously. The GPL (and other OSI-approved licenses) effectively prevents this scenario. The source code is available to virtually everyone, so there's no need to worry. If someone tries to sell a single GPL'ed piece of simple software of 1000 LOC for ยค10, proper local law will lead to punishment of this fraud. I find it hard to believe that Debian really regards this as an acceptable scenario, and would drop a package on that basis. The scenario is not the intention of Debian. Actually, it was just my personal (extreme) example to explain this issue. As stated, we have clear guidelines (in fact, the same as the OSI) and that's no matter of my personal view. If I wouldn't care about that, others would come and say the same. In fact, there were suggestions to remove latex2html obviously without consulting you. That was a clear trigger for me to intervene ... Instead, I suggest the complete removal of clause B. That would be the final move to make latex2html DFSG-compliant. That's too much to remove; I cannot do that. Well, then let's go on to the next possibility ... Alternatively, consider the adoption of an OSI-approved license as suggested by Michael Chapman (and me, previously). Many of the files in the LaTeX2HTML distribution are already under the GPL, so it may be acceptable to Nikos to put it all under this. That would be great! But then other developers would have to be contacted too. I assume it won't be me to do that. ;) When the licensing issue is resolved (which is most important to consider for the next Debian release), I'll come back with an assorted list of bugs where I depend on your help. You are definitely not responsible for all the bugs listed at Debian. I have a fix for the reported difficulty with \includegraphics on .jpg (and .png ?) images: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=183372 It's not committed to the repository yet. Feel free to mail it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to make it available to everyone (including Debian ;) before the next latex2html release. As stated by Jens Lehmann, this issue is important for many people. It being at least _possible_ to charge $200 is exactly what Debian requires from Free Software. Besides the GPL, please consider the LPPL or any other free license approved at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/. I believe it is possible to do this, with an aggregation of software packages, which is all that Debian requires, right ? See above. We are not in agreement yet. OK, I'm waiting for your decisions. Thank you very much! bye, Roland signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ latex2html mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/latex2html
[l2h] [Debian] #183372: \includegraphics{image.jpg} converts to image tag with a full path, making it useless
tag 183372 pending thanks Hi Ross and Jens, the Debian bug #183372 is obviously resolved by latex2html 2002-2-1 (you possibly don't need to investigate further). I built a package which should be uploaded to the Debian archive (sid) as soon as the licensing issue (#204684) is resolved. You can already have a look at it (and test :) by downloading the source and binary packages from http://www.antcom.de/debian/ or using the following /etc/apt/sources.list entries (it's just latex2html there and it's signed with my [EMAIL PROTECTED] key): deb http://www.antcom.de/debian/ ./ deb-src http://www.antcom.de/debian/ ./ Some other bugs should be addressed herewith but the majority will have to wait until after my exam in physics this month. :) Meanwhile, feel free to submit patches, suggestions etc. to the bug reports. I will try to take over the maintenance of the latex2html Debian package. bye, Roland signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ latex2html mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/latex2html
