[tex-live] TL licensing following FSF

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Thu Mar 16 19:28:11 CET 2006


karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) wrote:

> In LICENSE.TL, I would like to add something like "When FSF and Debian
> conflict, we generally follow the FSF."
>
> The problem is the GFDL; GNU manuals generally include invariant
> sections and texts, which Debian feels make them nonfree.  Their
> arguments have some merit, but I see no particular reason to perpetuate
> their decision into TL.  (Which would mean removing the Texinfo manual
> and probably a number of other manuals and documents.)
>
> If anyone feels strongly that we must follow Debian in this, feel free
> to express your opinion :).

For what it's worth - I'm not actually a texlive developer, but I am a
Debian developer -, I don't think texlive needs to follow Debian here.
While I think the GFDL is a really bad license, whether it's actually
non-free, and what freeness means for documentation is not even
uncontroversial within Debian.

Just make sure that you never have any non-world-readable files in the
repository, or at least non under GFDL, because that would be a license
violation.  The same is true for local copies, but who cares?

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)



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