[tex-live] csLaTeX/csPlain: Any news from Petr Olsak?

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Tue Jul 4 16:40:28 CEST 2006


Hi everybody,

I have tried to contact Petr Olsak a couple of days ago, having hoped
that, after the end of the thread about csTeX licensing, emotions had
calmed down a bit, and we could achieve a solution to the license
problems.  However, I have no yet gotten any answer from him.

Does anybody know about his whereabouts (maybe he's just on holiday?),
or does anybody think he's the right person to talk to him?

I feel very uncomfortable with continuing to distribute csTeX with its
self-contradictory license, "GPL with appendix".  It is
self-contradictory because the GPL part does not allow me (the
distributor) to impose any additional (not in the GPL text) restrictions
on the redistributed files, while the appendix requires me to do so.  In
consequence, the whole thing seems undistributable except by the
original author.  

As I understood it, the LPPL is what Petr really wants[1], and it just
requires some polite and friendly pushing by the right person.

What do you think?

Regards, Frank


[1] "the same as TeX" is what I think he said somewhere.  In writing
this would mean to s/Donald E. Knuth/Petr Olsak/;s/TeX/csTeX/ in
ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/macros/plain/base/README, but I don't
think this is a text anybody should use today as a new license.  In
particular, distribution (of original or modified versions) is only
allowed implicitly.

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)


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