Introduction

This article describes the principles underlying our policy on distribution and modification of the files comprising the L^ATEX system. It has been produced as a result of detailed discussions of the issues involved in the support and maintenance of a widely distributed document processing system used by diverse people for many applications. These discussions have involved users, maintainers of installations that support L^ATEX and various types of organisations that distribute it. The discussions are continuing and we hope that the ideas in this article will make a useful contribution to the debate.

Our aim is that L^ATEX should be a system which can be trusted by users of all types to fulfill their needs. Such a system must be stable and well-maintained. This implies that it must be reasonably easy to maintain (otherwise it will simply not get maintained at all). So here is a summary of our basic philosophy:

We believe that the freedom to rely on a widely-used standard for document interchange and formatting is as important as the freedom to experiment with the contents of files.

We are therefore adopting a policy similar to that which Donald Knuth applies to modifications of the underlying TEX system: that certain files, together with their names, are part of the system and therefore the contents of these files should not be changed unless the following conditions are met:

• they are clearly marked as being no longer part of the standard system;
• the name of the file is changed.