Re: [racket-users] Is it possible to sell commercial use rights to an open source Racket package?

[Alex Harsanyi]

On Wednesday, August 28, 2019 at 12:17:46 AM UTC+8, Joel Dueck wrote:
>
> On Friday, August 23, 2019 at 10:40:13 AM UTC-5, Alexis King wrote:
>>
>> Distributing a closed-source, non-LGPL Racket application without 
>> violating Racket’s licensing terms is likely to be very difficult or 
>> impossible, pending the still-ongoing MIT + Apache 2 relicensing effort. 
>>
>>
> This was startling for me to read, as I have been contemplating doing that 
> very thing.
>

I am curious to know how you plan to comply with section 4.d of the LGPL, 
which states that the users of your application must be able to replace the 
LGPL "library" with a modified version of their own -- this means all the 
racket packages that you use in your application (even the ones shipped 
with Racket):

Option 4.d.1 is not possible, since racket packages are not shared 
libraries.  

Option 4.d.0 would essentially require you to provide your customers with 
all the compiled object code (.zo files), along with instructions on how 
the user can reconstruct your application using a different Racket version 
-- I am not sure if this is even possible.  I guess, you could provide your 
customers with the source code for your application (along with a license 
which prevents them from re-distributing it), in this case they would be 
able to "link in" another version of Racket.  Perhaps there are other ways?

I like the intent of LGPL, but I think this detail makes it a poor fit for 
an environment like Racket.

Also, I am not a lawyer.

Alex.

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[racket-users] Is there an expanded form of the Racket2 purpose declaration?

[David Storrs]

The discussion on Racket2 seems to have moved offlist to the RFC list on
github (https://github.com/racket/racket2-rfcs/issues); are there other
locations?

There is one question that I had back at the beginning of the process that
I didn't manage to get clarity on, which is the rationale behind the whole
thing.  I've gone back through some of the email discussion and gone
through all 4 pages of the issues lists and read everything that seemed
relevant.  The most apropos thing seems to be this:
https://github.com/racket/racket2-rfcs/issues/105 but it still doesn't
really speak to my question.

My current understanding is that the rationale for the Racket2 effort looks
something like this:

"We, the core developers, many (all?) of whom are also academics with a lot
of experience teaching Racket to new programmers, have noticed that
parentheses and prefix notation are a stumbling block for many students.
We would like to help the ideas of Racket spread into the larger
community.  Therefore, we want to produce Racket2, which will have all the
power of Racket but will get rid of parens and use infix notation, which
will be more familiar and intuitive to students.  We also see this as a
great time to improve existing elements of the language based on what we've
learned since they were added, and potentially add new features."

Is this in fact correct?  Is there more specific discussion of it somewhere
that I've missed?  I don't want to make people retread the issue if it's
already clearly laid out elsewhere.

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Re: [racket-users] Is it possible to sell commercial use rights to an open source Racket package?

[Neil Van Dyke]

'Joel Dueck' via Racket Users wrote on 8/27/19 12:17 PM:

On Friday, August 23, 2019 at 10:40:13 AM UTC-5, Alexis King wrote:

Distributing a closed-source, non-LGPL Racket application without
violating Racket’s licensing terms is likely to be very difficult
or impossible,


This was startling for me to read, as I have been contemplating doing 
that very thing.


Questions and confusion about software licensing come up all the time, 
when a conscientious person tries to interpret software licenses.


Open source licenses don't seem as adversarial as many closed software 
licenses do, but are still confusing. I think one needs the background 
of a lawyer to even have a credible sense of whether one understands it 
sufficiently.


If one is doing open source, the open source licenses are so well-worn, 
with so much precedent, it doesn't appear to be stopping massive amounts 
of open source work out there.


On the other hand, if one is doing closed software, again, there's a lot 
of precedent of this working out well, and also, presumably, one is 
going to be paying a lawyer to draft/vet their own licenses, in any case 
(regardless of whether one uses Racket, or anything else), which I 
imagine requires taking a look at licenses of the software one's own 
software uses.  (And that lawyer will be vastly better qualified than 
myself and most of us to say (I imagine), "OK, this, that, and the other 
open source license thing are well-accepted, and you're not doing the 
sneaky thing that causes most problems, so I just have a question about 
whether this other thing over here is the same thing as what already has 
a common interpretation".  Then, there might be a lawyerly question, 
that can then be answered in a lawyerly way.  But if I tried to ask a 
lawyerly question, it would be the wrong question, and how I asked it 
would be wrong 10 different ways.)


After some consideration, I hereby announce my intent to distribute a 
closed source non-LGPL Racket application sometime within the next 
year. If anyone with standing has a problem with that, please let me know.


I agree with what I think you're implying: that licensing is unlikely to 
be a problem.  The informality reminds me of a funny bit from "The 
Office": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuZeff2y32M


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Re: [racket-users] Is it possible to sell commercial use rights to an open source Racket package?

[Matthew Butterick]

> On 27 Aug 19, at 9:27 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt  wrote:
> 
> 4. The interpretation of the LGPL as it relates to Racket that appears
> on the download page is our (the Racket leadership) interepretation,
> not the SFCs. None of us are lawyers, but that remains our
> interpretation.

So Racket's licensing is, or is not, supervised by an actual lawyer? In the 
past, I've gathered that Racket management has consulted with a lawyer on 
certain issues. But your comment suggests that maybe this isn't so. Or at least 
not for licensing.


> 3. The license of Racket has not changed as a result of joining the SFC.

> 6. The relicensing is something we hope to complete, but as the SFC is
> now the fiscal sponsor of the Racket project they are working to make
> sure it's done to their standards, which may require more time.

These statements seem somewhat at odds — how should they be reconciled? Do you 
mean that if & when the relicensing is completed, Racket's licensing will be 
thereafter be supervised by the SFC and its lawyers (because the relicensing 
needs to be "done to their standards")? As I understand it, though SFC's 
term-of-art legal designation is "fiscal sponsor", their relationship with 
member projects encompasses more than just fiscal matters. [1]

[1] https://sfconservancy.org/about/ 



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Re: [racket-users] Is it possible to sell commercial use rights to an open source Racket package?

['Joel Dueck' via Racket Users]

On Friday, August 23, 2019 at 10:40:13 AM UTC-5, Alexis King wrote:
>
> Distributing a closed-source, non-LGPL Racket application without 
> violating Racket’s licensing terms is likely to be very difficult or 
> impossible, pending the still-ongoing MIT + Apache 2 relicensing effort. 
>
>
This was startling for me to read, as I have been contemplating doing that 
very thing.

After some consideration, I hereby announce my intent to distribute a 
closed source non-LGPL Racket application sometime within the next year. If 
anyone with standing has a problem with that, please let me know.

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Re: [racket-users] LaTeX

[Norman Gray]

Hendrik, hello.

(a tangent...)

On 27 Aug 2019, at 14:16, Hendrik Boom wrote:

> That said, it doesn't even have a stable syntax.  I tried to find a
> grammar for parsing LaTeX, and discovered there is none.  It seems
> LaTeX's macros do the parsing, and they're a Turing-complete 
> laanguage.

Oh yes.  LaTeX is fun.

TeX has a _small_ set of very primitive commands -- loosely like 
add-character-to-list or add-box-to-list-of-boxes, none of which a 
normal user would type or be aware of -- and all of the rest is macro 
expansion.  LaTeX is just a package of macros, originally written by 
Leslie Lamport, sitting on top of (the package of macros that is) plain 
TeX.

The tokeniser turns "\emph  {x$y$}" into

  

at which point "emph" is looked up to see if it's a macro. "emph" is, 
and requires an argument, so the tokeniser then gobbles

  

this is replaced by the expansion of "emph"+arguments, which is then 
expanded, and so on until something expands to one or more primitives.  
Thus what syntax there is is entirely specified by the definitions of 
the macros.

Even the tokeniser is reconfigurable on the fly, so that the following 
is a valid LaTeX file:

 \documentclass{article}

 \catcode`@=0
 @catcode`<=1
 @catcode`>=2
 @catcode`;=14
 @catcode`\%=11 ; % is now just an ordinary alphabetic-letter

 @begin
 Hello, this is a 100% valid @LaTeX@ file.
 @end Although mathematical expressions
> (which Latex is all about) have tree structure (like MathML does, and
> is excessively wordy), for the most part latex represents mathematics
> as just a symbol cluster.

TeX doesn't represent any of the structure of the mathematics, because 
it's focused purely on the typesetting of maths (and other text).  
Semantics, as far as TeX is concerned, is for human readers.  Thus in 
$\sum_i x_i$, the fact that \sum is a summation is not important; what's 
important is that it's in a category of objects for which certain 
spacing and layout rules apply, and these are 
managed/implemented/realised by the internals of TeX -- the primitives 
-- not by any macros.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

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[racket-users] LaTeX

[Hendrik Boom]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 02:50:06PM -0700, Ilnar Selimcan wrote:
...
> 
> Arithmetic expressions can be included in s-expression code by simply 
> wrapping them with $ signs, like in Latex.
'''

LaTeX ... interesting.

It is a pure notation without semantics.  That is, it is a notation 
whose semantics *is* notation.  Although mathematical expressions 
(which Latex is all about) have tree structure (like MathML does, and 
is excessively wordy), for the most part latex represents mathematics 
as just a symbol cluster.  It does have some nesting, indicated by 
special brackets, for when the layout itself needs two-dimensions.

That said, it doesn't even have a stable syntax.  I tried to find a 
grammar for parsing LaTeX, and discovered there is none.  It seems 
LaTeX's macros do the parsing, and they're a Turing-complete laanguage.

It makes me appreciate Scribble.

-- hendrik

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[racket-users] Re: gen:stream doc fix?

[Simon Schlee]

I agree with your explanation and your version.
I think nobody expects stream-rest to change the concrete type of stream, 
unless there is a good reason for it.
My guess is that nobody noticed because it happens to work.

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