[tex-live] movie15 and media9

[Philip TAYLOR]

Norbert Preining wrote:
> Hi Phil,

> please remain reasonable, thanks.

I was, Norbert, I really was.  But if there is no quasi-legal
reason why a program that emits data that can only be meaningfully
consumed by a "non-free" program such as Acrobat Reader, simply
because no-one in the free-software movement has yet implemented
all of the features of Acrobat Reader, cannot be included in a
distribution that claims to conform to FSF guidelines, does that
/really/ justify removing said program from TeX Live ?

Siep, who is always moderate in her responses, writes :

> Patent- and copyright madness forces open source projects to be
> increasingly cautious with what they include. This is not enough
> reason to exclude media9, but if it were included then people would
> naturally be disappointed if the created documents were useless on
> their system.

But such documents are not "useless on their systems"; all that
is necessary in the vast majority of cases for such documents to
be useful is for the people who would otherwise be disappointed
to install the free Adobe Acrobat reader [1].  There is no possible
reason for them not to do so other than prejudice or dogma.

** Phil.
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[1] 
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=10&platform=unix