Bug#912557: Removal of British hyphenation patterns from TeX Live
Thank you, Mojca for this interesting and clear explanation. I tend to roll my eyes and eat chocolate when people start talking about licenses, but you make it seem clear and sensible. Thanks! Dominik On Sat, 3 Nov 2018 at 13:12, Mojca Miklavec wrote: > Hi, > > I just want to thank Dominik Wujastyk and Graham Toal for giving us > the permission to use the MIT licence for the British patterns. > > We will take care of the required modifications, release a new version > of hyph-utf8 and also ask for update in ConTeXt which triggered the > initial bug report. > > > To try to answer the concerns regarding the stability of old documents > ... I believe that what we need in TeX distributions is something > different from "please rename the file if you make any changes". (I > don't know what this could or should be, but I'm open to suggestions.) > > While the "TeX licence" made a lot of sense at the time when it was > written by D.E. Knuth, the "please rename" clause on its own provides > absolutely no guarantee that hyphenation of the English documents > won't ever change. Yes, the "TeX licence" is still sending a very > strong message to developers that Knuth wants others to rename their > new engines based on TeX to avoid confusion, but it doesn't legally > prevent anyone from using the same name for completely unrelated > software, or perhaps from creating a symlink like tex -> luatex in > some distribution. What keeps people back from doing that is more of a > "social contract" than the actual licence itself. > > As a case in point: anyone could have easily REMOVED the British > patterns from the distribution without violating the existing licence > in any way, yet the documents would change – despite the licence's > best efforts to prevent such changes. Or somebody could create some > nonsense patterns under any given filename, and only modify the > language.dat to load those nonsense patterns *instead of* the existing > British English ones, and again we would get rubbish output without > violating the old licence in any way. > > So: thanks again for the permission. And if needed, let's come up with > a better idea about how to keep stability and quality of old documents > within the TeX community. > > Thank you very much to everyone involved, > Mojca >
Bug#912557: Removal of British hyphenation patterns from TeX Live
Hi, I just want to thank Dominik Wujastyk and Graham Toal for giving us the permission to use the MIT licence for the British patterns. We will take care of the required modifications, release a new version of hyph-utf8 and also ask for update in ConTeXt which triggered the initial bug report. To try to answer the concerns regarding the stability of old documents ... I believe that what we need in TeX distributions is something different from "please rename the file if you make any changes". (I don't know what this could or should be, but I'm open to suggestions.) While the "TeX licence" made a lot of sense at the time when it was written by D.E. Knuth, the "please rename" clause on its own provides absolutely no guarantee that hyphenation of the English documents won't ever change. Yes, the "TeX licence" is still sending a very strong message to developers that Knuth wants others to rename their new engines based on TeX to avoid confusion, but it doesn't legally prevent anyone from using the same name for completely unrelated software, or perhaps from creating a symlink like tex -> luatex in some distribution. What keeps people back from doing that is more of a "social contract" than the actual licence itself. As a case in point: anyone could have easily REMOVED the British patterns from the distribution without violating the existing licence in any way, yet the documents would change – despite the licence's best efforts to prevent such changes. Or somebody could create some nonsense patterns under any given filename, and only modify the language.dat to load those nonsense patterns *instead of* the existing British English ones, and again we would get rubbish output without violating the old licence in any way. So: thanks again for the permission. And if needed, let's come up with a better idea about how to keep stability and quality of old documents within the TeX community. Thank you very much to everyone involved, Mojca
Bug#912557: Removal of British hyphenation patterns from TeX Live
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 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) 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
Bug#912557: Removal of British hyphenation patterns from TeX Live
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. Since Phil Taylor is the official custodian of these patterns, perhaps he should also give his assent. Do you want me to edit the file appropriately? Or will Phil, or you, Mojca? Thanks for bringing this to my attention! Best, Dominik On Thu, 1 Nov 2018 at 06:11, Mojca Miklavec wrote: > Dear Dominik, > > According to Debian we will probably have to delete the British > hyphenation patterns from TeX Live unless the licence changes. See: > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=912557 > > In general it is becoming increasingly problematic to use custom > (free-text) licences for each individual file. (It's problematic > enough to keep up distributions of millions of different files with > well-established licences, let alone having each individual lawyer > check whether the licence in file X is compatible with the licence in > file Y for N^2 combinations of those and ever increasing N.) > > A while ago we started suggesting the pattern authors to agree with > the MIT licence, but some other licences might be acceptable as well > (note that LPPL in particular is not acceptable for a number of > projects). > > Best regards, > Mojca >
Bug#912557: Removal of British hyphenation patterns from TeX Live
Dear Dominik, According to Debian we will probably have to delete the British hyphenation patterns from TeX Live unless the licence changes. See: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=912557 In general it is becoming increasingly problematic to use custom (free-text) licences for each individual file. (It's problematic enough to keep up distributions of millions of different files with well-established licences, let alone having each individual lawyer check whether the licence in file X is compatible with the licence in file Y for N^2 combinations of those and ever increasing N.) A while ago we started suggesting the pattern authors to agree with the MIT licence, but some other licences might be acceptable as well (note that LPPL in particular is not acceptable for a number of projects). Best regards, Mojca
