This document describes the principles underlying our policy on distribution and modification of the files comprising the LATEX system. It has been produced as a result of wide-ranging 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 LATEX and various types of organisations that distribute it. The discussions are continuing and we are hoping that this document will be widely distributed and make a useful contribution to the debate.
Our aim is to produce a system that which users of all types can trust to fulfill their needs. Such a system must be stable and well-maintained. This implies that it must be reasonably easy to maintain it (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 cannot be changed unless the following conditions are met: