tex-general
I'm planing to release a LaTeX template to share my adjustments I've worked out for an universty course. My first thought was to release it under CreativeCommons (BY-NC-SA 3.0) but right now I'm not sure if this affects the content of the user he adds to the TeX file to compile his PDF file.
I don't want to force the user to license his content under CC, just the changes he applies to the template.
Does some kind of CC license fit my purpose or do I have to switch to another license?
I'm a minister of religion and I use LaTeX for both sermons and theological papers. I keep all my work in version control and the plain text format just makes so much more sense than a word processor.
I'd love an excuse to put some mathematical notation into a sermon one day, but I'm yet to find one.
One area of TeX which needs to be improved is math spacing (starting from 2007, Word does better than TeX in this area). The TeXbook (in chapter 18) recommends quite a few manual adjustments most which could (and thus should) be automated (and the list is not complete). Here are a few examples, with the correct spacing below (the cos²+sin² is a bit subtle as it’s a thin space instead of a medium space, but it is an important change since it also changes the shrinking and stretching values):
The problem is that the 8 spacing classes (\mathord, \mathop, \mathbin, \mathrel, \mathopen, \mathclose, \mathpunct and \mathinner) are not enough to cover all the cases. You would need at least the following supplementary classes: \mathnull (no spacing at all, for / and the backslash used as quotient), \mathfact (for factorials), \mathsqrt (for square roots) \mathdiff (for differentials in integrals) and \mathdpunct (for double punctuation like : and ; in French typography, in which you want a thin space both after and before).
Best Answer
This is a very good question!
I would suggest using the GPL or LGPL.
In this case, I think you can safely position your templates as a work of Software and not Content. Both licenses are very specific in stating that any modification of the program source must be redistributed with the same license. They also make no restrictions on the use of software for producing output in any form. The LGPL is a bit more liberal in allowing distribution with bits of non-free software.
Where it gets ambiguous is the question of weather or not the compiled PDF, PS or DVI file is a "compiled binary" of the source TeX file. In this case, you may want to make it very clear in your README file that you make no restriction on the output produced with the templates and only wish to apply the license to modified versions of the TeX template files. Alternatively, you might want to rewrite one of these licenses to suit this particular problem as they contain specific language that relates to the technical conventions of compiled software.
CC licenses are generally for output content like texts (PDFs), images, audio and films. Although they are inspired by Free and Open Source models, they are not designed to deal with this particular question of source vs. output. GPL, BSD, MIT and other FLOSS licenses are more specific on these questions, so I would suggest avoiding CC in this case.