[tex-live] Unclear License of AMSLaTeX

[Karl Berry]

    Yes, and what about taking out only a portion - e.g. the algorithms for
    paragraph and page breaking - while the rest - parsing, expanding,
    ligatures etc - are implemented independently?

I'm sure that's ok, because you're not copying the whole file and
editing it.  That sort of reuse is exactly what Knuth explicitly
permitted.

Maybe all he really cares about is redistributing an edited file as
tex.web, and a pdftex.web would be ok.  Hmm.  I can't recall him ever
addressing this question.

As an aside, I believe it would be rather difficult to take out just the
paragraph breaking (or any other significant subsystem), given tex.web's
reliance on global variables, etc.  I somehow have the impression that
the reimplementations in other programs have done it from scratch, not
using Knuth's .web source directly, except perhaps in small pieces.
Maybe I'm wrong ...

karl