[tex-live] Political showstopper

[Hans Hagen]

At 17:03 13/09/2003 +0200, Fabrice Popineau wrote:

>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.

I think that we (you) should somehow come up with a budget, even if it's 
imaginary. It's as with the internet servers, user groups happen to get 
bandwidth for free, but actually it should be in their budgets.

If we know (at least can visualize) that a tex live version costs say 
150.000 euro per year, and that by chance we seem to get people's time for 
free, at least we have a number to mention to third parties. It would be 
easier then to ask publishers who put the cd in their book for some 
compensation (keep in mind that they budget books, so for them it would 
simply mean another budget item in a long list of items for a book).

Also, it would permit us to seek funding for those whose employer wants 
compensation (currently tl-win is on borrowed time from the xemtex project) 
and i dunny in what bends sebastian has to twist in order to get things 
done. In any case we could then at least recognize the work and send some 
thank you letters to the organizations involved.

(also, users (groups) should be aware that the few euros is just for 
production)

Hans
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