[tex-live] Political showstopper

Fabrice Popineau Fabrice.Popineau at supelec.fr
Sat Sep 13 18:03:56 CEST 2003


Fabrice>  Could there be another option splitting those people into 2
Fabrice>  groups: any individual could do that, and any company should
Fabrice>  ask (negociate?) the non-exclusive right to use it?

Karl>  No.  That would make it non-free.

So what? Lots of software available for free have a different license
scheme (Aladdin, Apache, whatever). I don't think it penalizes anybody.

Karl>  By analogy, the GPL has been infringed many times, usually
Karl>  through ignorance or misunderstanding.  When rms find out, he
Karl>  talks to them about it and gets them to correct it (so far,
Karl>  without having to go to

I surely hope it can get fixed.

Karl>  court).  He doesn't stop working on the GNU project.

I'm not the one who suggested stopping working on TeXLive.

I don't know how many copies  of those books  have been sold, but do you
honnestly think they (those  editors) could  not have  given 1  buck per
copy sold to the users groups, acknowledging their existence by the same
way?

Developing this  cdrom costs  money,  both  in hardware/software  and in
time. Users groups  take care about hardware/software  (plus a couple of
institutions), time is for free.  Maybe it will be time to wonder how
far we should go in this direction. I'm ok as long as it is about
supporting users. I'm not sure I want to help people earn money out of
this, at least without a decent acknowledgement of what is involved, and
an advertisement that this is a _free_ product.

Fabrice




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