[tex-live] Strange license of ukhyphen

[Frank Küster]

Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:

> This is a good question. Frank, did you bring this to debian-legal when
> you removed ukhyphen from tetex? 

I don't know what Debian people did about that, this predates my
involvent.  All I did was tag the bug "fixed upstream" when I noticed
that the file was missing in the teTeX 3.0 betas, and remove it from
teTeX 2.0.2's tarball when we had to repackage it, anyway.  It is now
again in Thomas' tetexdevsrc repository.

> But Karl to be honest, this is the only file I have seen that has this
> special renaming clause, ie specifying that renaming it differently is
> not enough, several names are forbidden, too.

There is a related issue which has been brought up quite frequently on
debian-legal, there might be more instances, but for sure it's happened
with PHP: the license forbid to give any derived product a name that
"contains the letters php, in that order".  It was argued that such a
requirement was overly broad and inacceptable, since it also forbids to
use PHP code in an otherwise unrelated project called "graphplot" (or
similar).

I was never involved in these threads, and didn't read them carefully.
But to me it seems as if, by this reasoning, it is *not* overly broad to
"forbid" ukhyphenization, uk-hyphenization and abbreviations thereof.
The only thing I'm unsure about:  Does the word "match" in the license
mean that the strings are equal, or is it meant in the sense of a grep
match?  I'm unsure about the common english usage here;  I would read
the license as "ukhyphen1.tex or ukhyphnw.tex are okay".

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