[tex-live] Status 'TeX Collection' (CTAN part)

Klaus Hoeppner klaus at dante.de
Thu Sep 11 02:14:15 CEST 2003


Dear friends,

after the DANTE meeting this week I can give you some information regarding 
the estimated time frame of the DVD production.

Manfred Lotz, who is doing the snapshot and compilation, is working on it.
I make the cover.  We found a schedule that is realistic, but challenging,
with the result that I want to be ready with the cover next week, Manfred
wants to be ready with the images last Friday in September, and the production
should be done until October 2nd (as Oct. 3 is a bank holiday in Germany).
In this schedule Manfred would expect the final TeX Live images
to be ready around September 22nd to do the final merge of CTAN
and TeX Live. (You see, burning is faster than printing)
But be aware it is the first DVD we ever produced, so we will be careful and
only send the images to the duplication company when we think they are
working and tested, as we will only merge the TeX Live DVD when the
TeX Live team says it is ok. With other words, we want to reach quality,
not a fixed date, and would like to reach both (and Manfred does a fine work, 
so I am more optimistic than I use to be normally).

The plan for merging is:
The directory structure of TeX Live DVD will remain as is, there will only
a directory called 'ctan' occur, which contains the ctan snapshot.
So we hope there shouldn't occur problems with setup and documentation.
(BTW: We assume it is better to keep the symbolic links in TL?)

I made some changes in the front cover compared to the first draft.
I replaced 'Edition 2003' with 'Edition 9/2003', the names of editors
(Sebastian and Manfred) are now in the bottom bar, while the list of
LUGs is removed. As in the last years CTAN snapshots, *any* LUG
I know to exist will be listed in the inner part of the cover, no matter
wether it will order the collection or not. The draft is available from
http://lbdb01.gsi.de/cover/front.pdf or
http://lbdb01.gsi.de/cover/front.jpg

There will neither be a copyright remark on the cover nor on the CD/DVD 
labels, as I don't regard the attitude of some publishers as fair, to include 
(maybe modified) TeX Live CDs into their books and print a copyright on
them (like the TeX Live CD in 'LaTeX fuer Dummies' is marked as
(c) MITP and - up to my knowledge, at least Volker claimed it - similar
for the one in Springer's book about digitial typography) .

Regarding the license text of  TeX Live I see a problem for the merged TeX 
Live and CTAN DVD. It states that to best knowledge there is only Free 
Software on it. This is definitely wrong for the things in the nonfree part 
of CTAN, and I doubt the CTAN-Team would say that up to their best
knowledge there is nothing nonfree remaining in the other parts of CTAN.
So I would like to propose a slightly different LICENSE.DVD instead of the 
LICENSE.TL (for the CDs nothing would be changed), clarifying that
TeX Live only contains free software while the things in the ctan directory 
tree can have different licenses.

My proposal is:
-----------
Copying conditions for TeX Collection (TeX Live and CTAN snapshot).

You may copy, modify, or redistribute software from this distribution
only if you comply with the requirements placed thereon by the owners of
the respective software packages.  To learn these requirements, please
check Graham Williams' TeX Catalogue at:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html
(or any CTAN mirror, of course).
The Catalogue is also included in TeX Live at
./texmf/doc/html/catalogue/catalogue.html, but the online version will
have updates.

If you make any changes to any package or the TeX Live distribution
itself, of course you should prominently mention such changes in your
modified distribution so that users do not take your work for ours, and
know to contact you, not us, in case of questions or problems.

We recommend using an existing free software license, such as the LaTeX
Project Public License, the GNU Public License, the Lesser GNU Public
License, the X Window System license, the modified BSD license, etc.
Please see http://www.debian.org/intro/free for more discussion of this.

To the best of our knowledge, all software in the TeX Live part of the
distribution (these are the TeX Live demo and installation CD-ROMs and
the DVD without the directory "ctan") is freely redistributable (libre,
that is, not necessarily gratis), within the Debian Free Software
Guidelines (see the url above).  If you find any problematic files
included in the TeX Live part of the distribution, or if you have other
questions or comments regarding TeX Live, email us at tex-live at tug.org.

The directory "ctan" on the DVD contains a snapshot of CTAN, the
Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (please refer to ./ctan/README.HTML
for details). The software packages in this directory tree have
various license conditions, both free licenses like LPPL or GPL and
restricted licenses (this is definitely the case for the packages in
./ctan/nonfree). If you find any problematic files included in the
CTAN part of the distribution, or if you have other questions or comments
regarding the CTAN snapshot, email us at cdrom at dante.de.

Thanks for your interest in TeX.

- Sebastian Rahtz, editor, for the TeX Live team
TeX Live home page: http://www.tug.org/tex-live/

- Manfred Lotz, editor of CTAN snapshot
CTAN home page: http://www.ctan.org
--------

The diff to the original TL license is:

1c1
< Copying conditions for TeX Live.
---
> Copying conditions for TeX Collection (TeX Live and CTAN snapshot).
23,27c23,38
< To the best of our knowledge, all software in this distribution is
< freely redistributable (libre, that is, not necessarily gratis), within
< the Debian Free Software Guidelines (see the url above).  If you find
< any problematic files included, or if you have other questions or
< comments, email us at tex-live at tug.org.
---
> To the best of our knowledge, all software in the TeX Live part of the
> distribution (these are the TeX Live demo and installation CD-ROMs and
> the DVD without the directory "ctan") is freely redistributable (libre,
> that is, not necessarily gratis), within the Debian Free Software
> Guidelines (see the url above).  If you find any problematic files
> included in the TeX Live part of the distribution, or if you have other
> questions or comments regarding TeX Live, email us at tex-live at tug.org.
>
> The directory "ctan" on the DVD contains a snapshot of CTAN, the
> Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (please refer to ./ctan/readme.html
> for details). The software packages in this directory tree have
> various license conditions, both free licenses like LPPL or GPL and
> restricted licenses (this is definitely the case for the packages in
> ./ctan/nonfree). If you find any problematic files included in the
> CTAN part of the distribution,or if you have other questions or comments
> regarding the CTAN snapshot, email us at cdrom at dante.de.
32a44,46
>
> - Manfred Lotz, editor of CTAN snapshot
> CTAN home page: http://www.ctan.org

Best regards (and good night)
Klaus



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