[tlbuild] texlive and politics...

[Thomas A. Schmitz]

Hi everybody,

I have hesitated for a long time whether this should be a private 
message to Karl, but I think that it may be of some general interest to 
all builders, so I hope it isn't an abuse of this list. There was a 
somewhat animated discussion on the general texlive mailing list 
yesterday on the question if/why some packages in texlive were non-free 
and should be excluded. I have read through all the messages. A number 
of clear and intelligent arguments were made on both sides; if you're 
interested, look at the messages. There was one detail that had me a bit 
worried, though, so I will quote it here.

> Robin Fairbairns wrote:
>
>> Victor Ivrii <vivrii at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am afraid that this interpretation would axe from TL the host of
>> packages which rely upon Adobe Reader for parsing (either embedded
>> players or javascript or comments).
>
> that is the intention.
>
> unfortunately, alexander grahn gave karl berry a list of packages that
> use features of acrocr*p reader.

If this is true, this would make the texlive effort a crusade for 
software freedom defined in very narrow terms. I know that there are 
some good reasons for this narrow view, but I find this direction too 
draconian. Actively removing packages that implement features which are 
not supported by "free" pdf viewers strikes me as excessive. In this 
case, I would not want to be a (however small) part of texlive anymore. 
I'm not trying to influence any decision, I'm just trying to understand 
what I'm in for when I'm part of texlive, so I would welcome any 
clarification.

Thanks and best wishes

Thomas