<html><head><meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"></head><body><pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">\centerline{\bf Copyright}
\medskip
\noindent
One very recent \hax\ message concerned the
issue of copyright. This struck a chord with me,
since I recently obtained Pat Monardo's C-\TeX\
(referred to  here as CommonTeX),
which contains a rider about copyright.
The message was from Ozan Yigit (as Sebastian
Rahtz said, the names are often unusual to
British ears). Granted that all this is about US copyright law,
I'm sure it still does have relevance to the future
of `\TeX-in-C' at the least. I have abbreviated it
only very slightly. 
 He (or she) writes:

{\narrower
\noindent
``I have been following, with great interest, the
recent
chatter surrounding the C implementation (Ctex) of
\TeX. Many institutions may have now discovered that
the copies of
CTeX obtained from Texas A\&amp;M are not (somehow) legal, as indicated by
Tomas Rokiki, who has a copyright notice on Ctex sources.

I would like to suggest that there has possibly been
an abuse of the US copyright laws, and both Ctex and CommonTeX cannot,
in fact carry anyone else's copyright except that of Don Knuth,
and hence, carry the same distribution rights\slash
restrictions [if any] of the original \TeX.

Why: If I am not mistaken, US copyright laws suggest
that a translation of an originally copyrighted
work carries the same copyright as the original ---
in other words, mechanical and\slash or hand translation
does not obliterate the original copyright.

One lawyer, Jordan J. Breslow, did address the issue of
`derivative works' in his most enlightening paper. He indicates
that the translation of, say a copyrighted COBOL
program to BASIC would be the infringement of the copyright
owner's exclusive right to make derivative works.

Is there something missing? Did Don Knuth drop his
copyright on \TeX?

Now, it is possible that there exists a license arrangement
between Tomas Rokiki and Don Knuth, which allows
Tomas to claim copyright on Ctex. If such
is the case, I would like to know about it, so that I can
understand a request to flush all binaries and sources
of Ctex obtained from Texas A\&amp;M. The same issue,
of course, applies to the `copyleft' notice of
Pat Monardo, for the CommonTeX implementation.''
\smallskip}


\rightline{\sl Malcolm Clark}
\bigskip
\centerline{\bf News from the other side}
\medskip
\noindent
Not only do we have news from the west coast of the US,
but there is also a resident UK\TeX ie at Harvard ---
\DW. Dominik managed to achieve electronic communication
with |texline@ic.cc.vaxa|, and I have synopsised
some of his messages to give a Harvard-eye view
of the \TeX\ world.

I quote:
{\narrower ``The latest \TeX\ news I have is that there
is a \MF\ course next month at Radnor, Penn, which costs \$650
to attend! Run by Doug Henderson, who did the Personal\TeX\
implementation of \MF. The price is outrageous, and the same
goes for the Protext conference here in Boston.

Norman Naugle has a new \TeX\ previewer 
valled CDVI (or something) which is 
extremely good (according to him!): it is
optimised to give very fast screen presentation of a
|dvi| file, and apparently it can do
all sorts of tricks with colour (why?) on an EGA.
He will charge \$175 for it, and is still adding further
graphics systems support to it, such as the Olivetti
6300 $640\times400$ board.

Frans Velthuis is bringing his work on
Devanagari metafonts towards a conclusion.
He has more or less linished the character set
for Hindi, and is working on the few extra characters
needed for Marathi and Sanskrit, and things like the
numerals.''
\smallskip}

Dominik also raves about ``a fantastic little utility
on the PC\TeX\ bulletin board'' which helps
in the creation of CM fonts from the |.mf| files
distributed with pc{\mf MF}. He also notes that
it takes about eight hours to create all 74 CM
fonts at one magnification on an 8 MHz AT.

And lastly, he reminds me to say something about
the programs Graham Asher and Clwyd Probert of Informat
are writing:

{\narrower\noindent``They are astounding. One creates gigantic \TeX\ macro files
automatically, from choices you make on a large set of
layered menus. The other, related program reads
a {\it wysiwyg} table, and writes the \TeX\ code
to typeset it! The dividing lines and corners, etc., can
be any characters you choose. Again I was most impressed.''
\smallskip}
\noindent
There will be something on these new \TeX\ add-on
products at \TeX88. Graham will likely be giving at
least one
paper, and a hands-on demonstration must be
inevitable. It is probably true that Informat is
the most progressive hive of \TeX\ activity
in the UK at present, as Graham's article
in the previous \TeX line, `{\bf\TeX\ and the
Linotron 101}' and the
letter overleaf attests. Graham, Clwyd and the
other programmers at Informat are producing some very powerful
software which will help in increasing the use of
\TeX. Although the menu-driven `front-end' bears
some similarity to systems like {\it Page One},
it is far more general, without being more
cumbersome or difficult to use. 

\rightline{\sl Malcolm Clark}

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