TeX Live 4 available for ordering

[Michel Lavaud]

Hello Karl,
 
> tex-live@tug.org is Sebastian, Kaja Christiansen, Patricia Monohon, Art
> Ogawa, and myself.  We have all been involved at varying levels for
> varying lengths of time with TL 4.

Thank you very much for the information, and hello to the five of you ! 

>     The membership fee to AsTeX association is 50 FF for students and
>     100 FF for others, and we do not want to increase this fee. 
> 
> Certainly understandable.
> 
>     As for TeX Live, our policy is to charge 100 FF for it. Is it OK for
>     you? 
> 
> Unfortunately it's not strictly legal to charge anything extra at all
> for TL, and charging significantly more than the actual cost of the CD
> (which is a lot less than 100FF, more like 5FF if the currency
> conversion I just did is accurate) is even more problematic.
> We hope to change this next year, so that you will be able to charge
> anything you wish, but this year, we are stuck with it.  So I'm afraid
> you'll either need to make it a free benefit of membership if possible,
> or charge at most your cost plus a slight overhead (say 10FF) for it.
> Sorry about that, it's the software's conditions, not ours.

Which software exactly? Could you tell me the names of authors, so that  I
could contact them? Thank you very much in advance.
 
> Let us know what you want to do.

Gutenberg association charges 200 FF for membership plus TeX Live. There
would be no problem for us in adding an extra category "membership plus TeX
Live" for 200 FF : this is really a matter of presenting the same amount of
money in one way or the other. 

As there seems to be some suspicion that we would make some personal
benefits on your work or on the work of somebody else, please let me
emphasize that this is not the case. We do not make any personal profit,
all work in AsTeX association is made benevolently. We do not even pay
anybody to do the boring work (mailings, secretary work etc.), everything
is done benevolently by the members of the CA. And, believe me, this is a
very hard, boring and time-consuming work.

As for the money : all the money goes into making mailings to make TeX more
known in France, writing software to help using TeX, writing books in
French, translating documentations into French, and providing financial
support to software developpers (about 15000 FF last year to some German
and Russian developpers).

Best wishes,