Bug#912557: Removal of British hyphenation patterns from TeX Live

[Philip Taylor]

Dominik Wujastyk wrote: The UK hyphenations patterns must stay within TeXlive, that's a given.  So let's change the license on the pattern files.  As co-creator of the file, I hereby agree with the MIT license.  I don't know if Graham Toal, the person who worked with me on producing these patterns, can be reached.  I'll try.  I am certain it was Graham's intention, like mine, that these patterns should always be freely available to everyone. Having read the MIT licence [1], I feel that it is incompatible with the intentionally-immutable nature of hyphenation patterns for TeX, since it explicitly allows modification and subsequent re-distribution without requiring a concomitant renaming : Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. However, there is a licence which is ideal for this purpose and which is, by definition, acceptable within the TeX community, coming as it does from none less than Don Knuth himself :  it is the licence of tex.web — % This program is copyright (C) 1982 by D. E. Knuth; all rights are reserved. % Copying of this file is authorized only if (1) you are D. E. Knuth, or if % (2) you make absolutely no changes to your copy. (The WEB system provides % for alterations via an auxiliary file; the master file should stay intact.) % See Appendix H of the WEB manual for hints on how to install this program. % And see Appendix A of the TRIP manual for details about how to validate it. I therefore propose that we use Knuth's licence, appropriate modified in terms of name and date and omitting all words after "(2) you make absolutely no changes to your copy".  Thus the licence might read : % This data is copyright (C) YYYY by the TeX hyphenation team; all rights are reserved. % Copying of this file is authorized only if (1) you are a member of the TeX hyphenation team, or if % (2) you make absolutely no changes to your copy. If the Debian authorities choose to rule that tex.web can no longer be included in Debian distributions, then the accompanying loss of the British English hyphenation patterns will be of zero concern. -- Philip Taylor