Taco Hoekwater wrote:

Hi Brooks,

Are you on the dev-context@ntg.nl list? If not, would you please subscribe? It would make communication about the contextgarden stuff easier ('talking' through the wiki's Talk pages is not optimal), and also the user mailing list is quite large and most people on it are beginners who should probably not be bothered with technical / development things too much. Is that ok?

On the license: I believe the context license should essentially be the LPPL, and the two reasons why it is not currently are: 1) there was no usable LPPL when context first became public 2) Hans and I are unhappy with the word "LaTeX" in the name.

indeed, there is no generic tex license (and the main issue for us in a tex licence is that although people may do what they want with teh code, they may not mess aroudn in such a way that we suddenly get mails about something not working that we have nothing to do with); [a tex system s a complex system and acts a s whole i.e. macros, fonts, etc and integrety of the system is a must]; i must admit that i don't understand the n-page gnu licences (the simple fact that they need so many pages is a bad omen) and i'm probably not alone in this given that there are apache licences, ruby licences etc; actually when i looked into it (long ago) i liked the apache one, but it has the name apache in it -) 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. 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] Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------