[tex-live] Install Texlive 2008 "The Pirate Bay" website --- uncompressed

David Kastrup dak at gnu.org
Tue Oct 7 10:40:56 CEST 2008


Patrice Dumas <pertusus at free.fr> writes:

> On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 09:26:21AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>> "Martin Schröder" <martin at oneiros.de> writes:
>> 
>> > 2008/10/7 Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:
>> >> IMO the situation is not acceptable.
>> >
>> > I find censorship not acceptable.
>> 
>> It is not censorship to select advertisements (and their prices)
>> according to the tolerance level of your customers and the interests of
>> the customers.  That's just the market at work.
>
> And how can you say what advertisement suits texlive potential users?

That's not the question.  The question is what advertisements are
acceptable to the content providers, in this case the TeXlive team.

Most children would have little qualms accepting and enjoying adult
advertisements in their books.  But they are not the ones making the
decisions.

> If the advertisement restrict the userbase for a legal reason, then it
> make sense to change advertisements, but otherwise I see no reason for
> discrimination, since free software is also based on
> non-discrimination among uses.

You are confused.  Free software gives you the freedom to use it in any
way you want.  Advertisements don't give you the freedom not to see them
in the first place.  They are designed to convey their message in 5
seconds, and the first 2 of them you can hardly avoid.

If I don't like advertisements in my free software, I can remove them,
once and for all.  If I don't like advertisements in my software
tracker, tough.

Personally, I don't use web tools for that sort of thing, so I am not
likely to see advertisements of any sort.  But if there is sufficient
annoyance among the TeXlive team about the suggested message, I can
understand the desire to look elsewhere.

-- 
David Kastrup


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