[tex-live] texlive 8

Thomas Esser te at dbs.uni-hannover.de
Wed Feb 5 20:07:56 CET 2003


> Don spoke at a TUG meeting long ago about his desire to have them
> available for inspection, even though the publisher was reticent.  I'm
> certainly glad that he prevailed, and I seriously doubt that the
> publisher has lost any significant amount of revenue.  I use them for
> benchmarking, and for answering the `how did he do that?'  questions

te <-> rms conversation:

rms wrote:
> te wrote:
> > Knuth has published these files which are the sourcecode of his books to
> > give other people the possibility to see how he has done it. Even if we
> > don't have some rights, I see some value that we have by the possibility
> > to look at these files and to study his code.

> It may be of some use in some way, but that doesn't make it free.  We
> can't accept a program or manual that is less than free.  The point of
> GNU is to be entirely free.  If a piece of teTeX is non-free, we could
> not use teTeX as released; we would have to make a modified version.

> These files will be available in any case, for people who want them;
> the question is only whether they will be included in teTeX.

> > I don't want to argue with you, but if you have the time, please explain
> > why not having these files is better then having them.

> If teTeX does not include them, then it is 100% free software.
> That makes it a lot better than if it weren't 100% free software.

So, if TeX Live wants to be free software, these files can not be part
of it.

Thomas


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