On 1/23/2016 1:16 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
Hi,
I have a (somewhat theoretical) question.
When we first changed files back in 2008 we renamed all files, so that
was probably OK even by LPPL standards. Now assume the following
scenario:
- we made the initial changes and renamed the files to hyph-xy.tex
- then the original author made some further functional changes to
hyph-xy.tex in the meantime and sent them to us, we included his
latest version of the file, still licenced under LPPL
- we now want to do further modifications (not changing the patterns
functionally, just completely reformatting everything, reorganizing
comments, ...)
It's not clear to me what LPPL says about that scenario. I mean: does
[strictly speaking] the LPPL licence require from us to mark further
modifications as derived work (with all the extra work and
consequences like potentially having to rename the files etc.)?
I'm not asking about common sense, but about "worst case" that the
licence is asking from us.
I don't want to be formally responsible for the contents of patterns
and I don't think it's fair to list myself as the co-author if all I'm
doing is just data collection and some basic maintenance. On the other
hand we are maintainers of those files in some sense, so the absence
of being listed as the author should not prevent us from changing
files. But LPPL rules are not really clear to me in that respect.
as you are doing a coordinated effort in the context of the main tex
distribution you can probably assume that most authors are happy to have
delegated the packaging, checking, preparation to you, so maybe you're
not making the derived work but the 'final work' using data supplied by
others (data that would otherwise be rather useless and not used in
macro packages) ... i think the somewhat strict licenses like lppl are
mostly to protect work derived from originals to be messed up in ways
that bleed back into distributions thereby introducing a support issue
imo that is also one of the main tasks for user groups (and projects
like this): make sure that stuff got packaged right; i doubt if there is
any author who would object to your repackaging esp because it makes the
patterns useable
Hans
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