> > Something like this: > > > > You must not cause files to misrepresent themselves as approved by > > the official LaTeX maintenance group, or to misrepresent > > themselves as perfectly compatible with such files (according to > > compatibility criteria established by the official LaTeX > > maintenance group). > > does this ban > > % This is not actually standard LaTeX, but we do this for ease of use: > \set{\latexversion}{standard} > > The LaTeX people [...] want a ban on something which > programmatically interfaces in certain ways with Standard LaTeX. > The DFSG will accept a ban on making false claims of authorship to > humans, but not a ban on making such false claims to a program.
Well, under the "misrepresentation" clause above, this would in fact be banned ... if its effect were to misrepresent the file as standard LaTeX, and the comment were just a subterfuge. Whether this is the case would depend on the context. But if something like that ended up fooling people about whether it was standard, then it certainly would be a misrepresentation! On the other hand, my impression is that the LaTeX people would be okay with such a file if (in context) there was care being taken to not fool anyone (accidentally or deliberately) into thinking that what was running was standard LaTeX, and the line of code were the just a technical means to get something to run, eg with some modified non-standard proprietary engine. In other words, I suspect that what is really going on is a question of INTENT, and subsequent effect. In this light, maybe the reason the LaTeX people are having such problems crafting a clear simple license is that at root they want to ban something based on intent, but (being computer programmers) they're trying to implement this by writing more and more complicated rules related to mechanism, and getting more and more specific to their particular implementation. I've CC'ed this to a LaTeX person - any comments from the LaTeX crowd?