Frank Mittelbach’s “moral obligation” license for the LaTeX multicol package

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:

%%  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.

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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.

Manchu dictionary done

Since late Spring of 2009, I have been helping my teacher, Jerry Norman, get the final revision of his Manchu lexicographic material into shape for publication. Earlier editions appeared in 1978 (U. Washington Press) and 1967 (Taipei). I have typeset it (strictly, composed it) using LaTeX and checked and corrected the entries in numerous fine details, and persuaded Prof. Norman to add material on pronunciation and the script, surely important in any dictionary of a foreign language. My mother, who knows neither Manchu nor Chinese but who has professional experience as a proofreader, has read the whole thing carefully twice and suggested countless improvements to the English and the organization of the book.

Now it is done. After two and a half years, today I sent Prof. Norman the final draft of the dictionary, which I hope will see print within 12 months, as A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary.

Doctoral pedigrees

The Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University documents lines of academic filiation (primarily through doctoral degrees) in mathematics. It makes for interesting reading. Though my degree is “Asian Linguistics”, I can connect myself to the mainstream mathematical tree through a sub-branch of four progenitor Doktorväter:

• Josiah Royce, 1878 (Philosophy)


• Henry M. Sheffer, 1908 (Philosophy)


• Yuen Ren Chao 趙元任, 1918 (Philosophy)


• Jerry Norman, 1969 (Oriental Languages)

[Update 20111213: Chao and Sheffer are now in the tree; see this post.] Sheffer and initially Chao studied logic, a field developed at Harvard by Royce. Sheffer is best known for having introduced the NAND operation to Boolean logic. Chao’s main scholarly contributions were in Chinese historical phonology and modern grammar. Jerry Norman has pioneered the rigorous study of Chinese dialect classification, which you might say is a type of applied logic.

Through Royce, I can trace my “pedigree” to various luminaries of the Humanist era: Erasmus, Vesalius, Ficino, Copernicus, Leibniz, and Marin Mersenne, a student of prime numbers after whom is named the Mersenne twister, a pseudo-random number generator now widely used on personal computers. To Kant, as well, and to non-Humanists like Thomas à Kempis and Thomas Cranmer. Most lines peter out in the early 15th century; earlier stragglers include the mathematician and theologian Heinrich von Langenstein, an antecedent of Copernicus who received his Theol. Dr. in 1375, while the neo-Platonist Georgios Plethon Gemistos seems to have received the first of his degrees in 1380.

There is romance in seeing one’s connection to people like Leibniz and Erasmus, but it means little beyond that. Does anyone with a PhD today, in any field, not belong to those lines of filiation? As of today, Erasmus is shown to have 95301 descendants listed in mathematics alone. I have learned an enormous amount from Jerry Norman, and it is justice to call him my Doktorvater. I find myself in strong agreement with Chao’s model of formal Chinese historical phonology, too, and I have a special love for logic. But the model of linguistic fieldwork I use owes considerably more to Robert Austerlitz and Li Fang Kuei 李方桂 than to Chao, whose approach I consider altogether too literary. I also identify myself intellectually with my maternal grandfather, who left school when he was 12 but was a voracious reader and lifelong pursuer of ideas. At best, all that a paper pedigree can do is remind me to try to be true to the effort that generations of scholars, known and unknown, have made in order to seek knowledge and see clearly — to those ideas and those people all human beings are equally heirs.

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There is at least one program available to generate graphs from the Project: see http://www.davidalber.net/geneagrapher/.