Thank you, Mojca for this interesting and clear explanation. I tend to roll my eyes and eat chocolate when people start talking about licenses, but you make it seem clear and sensible.
Thanks! Dominik On Sat, 3 Nov 2018 at 13:12, Mojca Miklavec <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I just want to thank Dominik Wujastyk and Graham Toal for giving us > the permission to use the MIT licence for the British patterns. > > We will take care of the required modifications, release a new version > of hyph-utf8 and also ask for update in ConTeXt which triggered the > initial bug report. > > > To try to answer the concerns regarding the stability of old documents > ... I believe that what we need in TeX distributions is something > different from "please rename the file if you make any changes". (I > don't know what this could or should be, but I'm open to suggestions.) > > While the "TeX licence" made a lot of sense at the time when it was > written by D.E. Knuth, the "please rename" clause on its own provides > absolutely no guarantee that hyphenation of the English documents > won't ever change. Yes, the "TeX licence" is still sending a very > strong message to developers that Knuth wants others to rename their > new engines based on TeX to avoid confusion, but it doesn't legally > prevent anyone from using the same name for completely unrelated > software, or perhaps from creating a symlink like tex -> luatex in > some distribution. What keeps people back from doing that is more of a > "social contract" than the actual licence itself. > > As a case in point: anyone could have easily REMOVED the British > patterns from the distribution without violating the existing licence > in any way, yet the documents would change – despite the licence's > best efforts to prevent such changes. Or somebody could create some > nonsense patterns under any given filename, and only modify the > language.dat to load those nonsense patterns *instead of* the existing > British English ones, and again we would get rubbish output without > violating the old licence in any way. > > So: thanks again for the permission. And if needed, let's come up with > a better idea about how to keep stability and quality of old documents > within the TeX community. > > Thank you very much to everyone involved, > Mojca >
