[tex-live] Free software and software licenses

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

This note, cross-posted to several lists, is to draw your attention to
the recent article ``Open Source is good for America - US military
advised'', by Andrew Orlowski, available at

	http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27822.html

It in turn points to the 160-page report ``Use of Free and Open-Source
Software (FOSS) in the U.S. Department of Defense: Version: 1.2'',
prepared by the MITRE Corporation for the U.S. Defense Information
Systems Agency, available at

	http://www.egovos.org/pdf/dodfoss.pdf

That report tabulates scores of open source software projects,
including emacs, gawk, ghostscript and LaTeX (but curiously, omits
TeX), and in particular, includes about 100 pages of software licenses
that accompany these packages.

By this posting, I do not wish to reopen debates on software licenses,
but rather, I felt that the collection of so many of them in one place
would be a very helpful reference for those of you who sometime might
have to be involved in software licensing questions.

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