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I recently took over maintenance of a university thesis class. A user had a question about the LPPL 1.3c: whether PDF outputs are covered by the license. According to this answer they are "unambiguously not".

Fine that they are not, but it's hardly unambiguous to me. Someone from my institutional IP office remarked "I have to be honest, this license is VERY difficult to read, even for someone who is familiar with reading licenses". Sorry to belabour the point, but I'm trying to capture what feels like broad frustration understanding the LPPL, which is relevant to LaTeX package users and maintainers alike (read: please don't close this as off-topic).

After some reading, I appreciate that LPPL 1.3c was carefully designed, but I feel the community could benefit from one key clarification: What is a Compiled Work?

The term "Compiled Work", defined in the licence as:

A version of the Work that has been processed into a form where it is directly usable on a computer system. This processing may include using installation facilities provided by the Work, transformations of the Work, copying of components of the Work, or other activities. Note that modification of any installation facilities provided by the Work constitutes modification of the Work.

and no examples are given. My current understanding is that mainly refers to "byte-compiled": machine readable 1s and 0s. For example, my TeX Live distribution contains 333 executables in a bin/ folder. Is this what "Compiled Works" means?

It is easy to see how this could be confused for the PDF output by many users, since its very common to describe the process of running *TeX on a document as "compiling". I feel it is worth amending the language of the LPPL 1.3c+ to clarify this point.

jessexknight
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    legal questions are off topic here by convention but basically the "canonical example" that is intended there is making foo.sty (the directly usable version) out of foo.dtx (the documented sources). – David Carlisle Jun 22 '21 at 22:50
  • Ah, that was my other thought. Only, many smaller packages do not use foo.dtx at all, only providing a documented foo.sty... – jessexknight Jun 22 '21 at 22:56
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    One of the main sources of frustration, it appears to me, is the fact that the LPPL was written from a (La)TeX standpoint and with LaTeX applications in mind, but is formulated in fairly general terms. Due to the nature of TeX as a language, however, some have interpreted some of these general terms fairly broadly in the context of other licenses (https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2735) – moewe Jun 23 '21 at 06:43
  • @moewe I definitely agree with this. It seems the DOTADIW principle was not applied to the license! And thanks for the other link, very helpful. – jessexknight Jun 23 '21 at 11:58

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