[tex-live] movie15 and media9

Heiko Oberdiek heiko.oberdiek at googlemail.com
Sun Mar 18 19:44:23 CET 2012


On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 11:26:35PM +0800, Horst Hohberger wrote:

> 1) movie15 and/or media9 is not using any proprietary components and is
> available under a "sensible" FOSS license

Yes, both are LPPL.
==> ok for TL.

> 2) the output of movie15 and/or media9 uses certain features of PDF that
> are part of the ISO standard

Yes.
AFAIK, it's ok for TL.

> 3) said features haven't been implemented by any viewer except Adobe's?

By any *free* viewer.
See http://www.tug.org/texlive/copying.html:
| Therefore, to the best of our knowledge, all the software in TeX Live
| meets the requirements of the Free Software Foundation's definition of
| free software, and the Debian Free Software Guidelines. In the rare cases
| of conflict, we generally follow the FSF.
With the links:
* Free Software Foundation's definiton of free software:
  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
* Debian Free Software Guidelines
  http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

And http://www.tug.org/texlive/copying.html states the
additional requirement:
| Furthermore, the material in TeX Live should not require nonfree software
| to be useful.

Nobody has shown the usefulness of movie15/media9 with free software yet.

> And it should still be excluded from TeXLive because of 3) ?

AFIAK, this is the reason.

> I understand the logic of excluding proprietary software, but out seems
> strange (to put it mildly) to use 3) as a basis for exclusion.

AFAIK, it's the policy of the TL team to support and strengthens
free software. But they don't want to fill their spare time with
many countless voluntary hours working on support for non-free
or even commercial software.

That's my impression/knowledge -- I am not a member of the team.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko Oberdiek


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