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Date:      Sat, 22 Mar 2014 12:27:07 -0700
From:      Kevin Oberman <rkoberman@gmail.com>
To:        marino@freebsd.org
Cc:        "ports@FreeBSD.org Ports" <ports@freebsd.org>, Nicola Vitale <nivit@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: LPPL10 license consequences intended? (arabic/arabtex)
Message-ID:  <CAN6yY1uf67ogKyqNO025%2BpcU21PmFYCiQULd4z6TsaYbFma3_A@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <532DC88A.7010104@marino.st>
References:  <532DC88A.7010104@marino.st>

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On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 10:29 AM, John Marino <freebsd.contact@marino.st>wrote:

> In December, Nicola set the license for Arabtex to LPPL10.
> The result is that the port is no longer packagable:
>
> > ====>> Ignoring arabic/arabtex: License LPPL10 needs confirmation, but
> BATCH is defined
> > build of /usr/ports/arabic/arabtex ended at Mon Mar 17 16:12:44 PDT 2014
>
> From a quick conversation on IRC, I got the idea that the license was
> correct and many more Tex packages should also have this license.
> If/when that happens, does that mean Tex packages are only to be built
> from source?
>
> Is it correct that LPPL10 can't be built in a batch?
> The impact for DPorts is pretty high because a requirement for a dport
> is that it can produce a binary package so right now it looks like I
> have to prune arabtex.
>
> John
>

Aside from any possible impact of the license, the Makefile contains:
NO_BUILD=       yes
so it ill never be packaged and redistributed. This is not an artifact of
the license and I don't know of the license would also block packaging.


I just read over LPPL and it i pretty clear that "Compiled Work" (i.e. the
binary code) may be redistributed:

3.  You may distribute a Compiled Work that has been generated from a
complete, unmodified copy of the Work as distributed under Clause 2
above, as long as that Compiled Work is distributed in such a way that
the recipients may install the Compiled Work on their system exactly
as it would have been installed if they generated a Compiled Work
directly from the Work.

Looking at the port, I see exactly NO modifications to the "Work". This
assumes that arabtex is, itself, part of the official "Distribution" of the
"Current Maintainers". It may be that it is, in fact, a "Derived Work", not
officially blessed by the "Current Maintainers". In that case it could not
be packaged under the terms of clause 3 (quoted above), but other LPPL
ports that are part of the official "Work" could be.

"Derived Work" may be redistributed as "Compiled Work" if certain
conditions are met. See clause 6 which is quite long and I am not confident
that I understand. (In fact, I'm quite confident that I don't fully
understand it.)

IANAL, but the text is pretty clear. I just have not spent the time to
confirm whether arabtex is "Work" of the project or "Derived Work" of the
official "Distribution". (Note that quoted terms are legally defined terms
in the license.)
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman@gmail.com



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