On Fri, 2002-08-09 at 17:47, Lars Hellström wrote: > Whereas this in principle could affect the inclusion-of-font-in-PS matter, > I doubt that it will in practice. It does however seem to me that this > aspect has a direct application to another matter, namely that of tarballs. > Jeff claimed in our discussion regarding the LPPL that, as I understood it > a general principle, tarballs automatically become derived works of > whatever is stored in them and that any license conditions for derived > works would automatically attach themselves to the tarball. (In particular: > if some file in the tarball has a "rename before modify" condition then > that would apply to the tarball as a whole and thus, I suspect, the tarball > would have to be renamed whenever anything was added to or removed from > it.) The above principle of intent seems, at least to me, to void that > argument. As long as there is no intent to use the tarball in any but the > normal ways then the conditions concerning derived works do not attach to > it. Instead the conditions attached to the tarball (at least this is what I > would expect as default conditions, if nothing else is said) should be that > whatever is produced by extracting the contents of the tarball in the most > common way satisfies the conditions for the files that have been put into > the tarball.
The problem is that the intent of the licensor is not made clear in the license. The GPL makes several statements of intent in the license itself, and grants exceptions for derived works that are "mere aggregations", for example. The LPPL does no such thing. Also, if you don't assume that the tarball is distributed under the LPPL, then under what license is it distributed under? Remember that you need a license to distribute any derived work.