At 12:48 PM 9/5/2005, Hans Hagen
concerning (2), as taco remarks, the tex world lost the opportunity to make a generic licence; there was some discussion about this at bachotek (a latex project licence for fonts makes no sense either); also, soem folks present made clear that the general gnu one is also not ok, since it can backfire in such ways that you cannot even change your own code without obeying to some rules that you don't want to obey to for pracical reasons.
Is the problem with the LaTeX Project license simply the name? I can understand that the name seems a bit odd for a font or for ConTeXt, but it really doesn't seem any stranger than putting a Gnu license on something that's unrelated to the Gnu project. (Also, I suspect that they had no choice in the name, as a lot of old programs were licensed under "LaTeX Project Public License version 1.1 or later" or suchlike.) And, as for Apache -- I understand that there are a number of non-Apache projects that use the license. Also, although the LPPL says at the top that it is not permitted to modify it, it then clarifies this further down with "You may use the text of this license as a model for your own license, but your license should not refer to the LPPL or otherwise give the impression that your work is distributed under the LPPL." So I think it would be perfectly acceptable to simply edit the portions regarding "Current Maintainer" to explicitly refer to Pragma, take out the "if you are the current maintainer" clauses, and call it the ConTeXt Public License. (I've sent off an email to the LaTeX3 Project for confirmation of that; I'll let you know what they have to say.)
So, concerning the context licence, it more shows how we think of it than that it is a legal document; [actually, i like those short creative common licences]
Indeed; there's an advantage to conciseness! It occurs to me, too, that if I have any questions in practice about whether I can use some code from ConTeXt, the simplest solution is simply to email and say, "Hans, can I use this code in this thing I'm making?" :) - Brooks