[tex-live] babel's greek nonfree

Sebastian Rahtz sebastian.rahtz@oucs.ox.ac.uk
06 Oct 2002 18:31:31 +0100


I heard a talk the other day from a Sun engineer about Open Office,
in which he explained how it had taken a large team an entire year to 
go through the source code and locate anything which might prevent them
releasing OO as open source. Now suppose Sun wanted to distribute
TeX as a standard component of something - if they suspected that
license restrictions like the Babel greek one existed, don't you think
they'd drop the idea like a stone? it's a legal nightmare!

teTeX, CTAN and TeX Live have gone through much pain over the last few
years trying to establish TeX as "free software". It would be very
dispiriting to lose eg the Debian approval at this late stage - and if
they found that thing about the Cretan publisher, you can be very sure
they'd have a fit!
-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      OUCS Information Manager
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431