In a recent paper on the history of the LaTeX Project Public License,
Frank Mittelbach includes a digression on the licensing of his
enormously useful multicol package. He describes the "moral
obligation" license of this package as
perhaps the most curious license ever drawn up, in that I required … the licensee to determine the importance of [the software] for his or her circumstances and determine the license fee from that. TUGboat 23(2011)/1:83–94; section 1.2 (p. 84)
The actual terms of the license appear in the multicol.sty file in the
standard LaTeX distribution:
~~~~ {style="font-size:small;"} %% Users of multicol who wish to include or use multicol or a modified
%% version in a proprietary and commercially market product are asked
%% under certain conditions (see below) for the payment of a license
%% fee. The size of this fee is to be determined, in each instance,
%% by the commercial user, depending on his/her judgment of the value of
%% multicol for his/her product. ... ~~~~
I wrote to Mittelbach recently about this matter, and he resolved my questions very charmingly.
Multicol enables segments of different numbers of columns to appear on
the same page, along with other functionality helpful in formatting
columns. I have used this package in typesetting Jerry Norman's Manchu
dictionary, to place single-column headings at the start of each
letter-section in an otherwise two-column text. For example:
I think this sort of section-header must be desirable in many dictionaries.
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