[tex-live] Political showstopper

Sebastian Rahtz sebastian.rahtz at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Sun Sep 14 00:47:41 CEST 2003


I will attempt to reply to this thread at some leisure.
It is of great interest to me in my role of an Open Source
Advisory Service.

One thing I must say, though, is that the TeX community
in general, and TeX Live, must decide whether or not
it really subscribes to the Free/Open Source philosophy.
It is an absolutely central tenet of this that we may NOT
place restrictions, conditions etc on anyone using the
software, for any purpose. So we write a program, and
some publisher makes millions from our work - that's
the way it goes!  Open source developers don't make
their money from selling software, or expect to
be recompensed directly for the time and resources.
Sound's harsh, and it is, but it's at the very core
of the free software movement!


Sebastian


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