[tex-live] Re: ConTeXt documentation in "commercial" products

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Tue Jan 24 14:34:39 CET 2006


Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> wrote:

> I will add the following sentence to the readme:
>
> If you distribute \CONTEXT\ and related software on electronic media
> as part of \TEX\ distributions, you may also distribute the manuals
> in electronic form, preferable as provided by the maintainers of
> \CONTEXT.

I'm not sure whether this will change anything, without specifically
talking about commercial distribution.

> Btw, context documentation is part of the tex collection but not of
> tex live; the reason is that tex live only ships documentation for
> which a source is avaliable (and since there is never the guarantee
> that a source is complete, will run, has all graphic and font
> resources with it, it means that this criterium is hard to meet,
> i.e. what is a source: if i generate an html page from an xml file, it
> has no source either). 

I don't think this is true, as Karl has already pointed out.

> Technically this means that a pdf file like
> mreadme.pdf will not be distributed. Afaik substantial context
> documentation and samples (over 100 meg in pdf form) are no part of
> linux distributions either. But i have absoutely no problems if the
> manuals are distributed (as long as it does not cost me time).

Doesn't it cost you more time if people don't have the (up-to-date)
documentation installed along with their TeX distribution, find some old
version somewhere on the net and start asking stupid questions?

> Currently, context manuals are put (stepwise) under svn, and for
> practical purposes it's done on one of our internal machines with a
> copy on taco's website. However, there is no guarantee that each
> document runs as intended (i.e. there are fall backs when i use for
> instance non public fonts, or non public graphics, and i don't provide
> support for that).

Oh, font replacements wouldn't be a big problem; graphics without
"sources" (the preferred form of modification) probably would be.  But
if you start putting this in the public, maybe we'll end up with a
distributable source of the ConTeXt documentation sooner or later, even
if it's impossible now.

> At some time I may put a zip archive with the manuals alongside the
> other context zips, but i wonder is there is any interest in those
> tens of megabytes.

The point is that as a general rule, we want to be able to modify the
documentation.  Imagine me writing FKonTeXt, with some of the internal
defaults changed to suit my and other's special needs - I think it'd be
much better if I could provide the users with a correct manual for
FKonTeXt, instead of just a "these are the differences to ConTeXt,
besides that read the ConTeXt docs".  

> BTW, concerning GPL and manuals ... manuals are no programs and i like
> the simple and understandable CC ones

I'm not sure, and I'm not a legal guy, too; but it seems to me that the
CC licenses without any commercial restriction would be okay provided
that the source is available.

Regards, Frank

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



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