Comment 18 for bug 27858

Message-ID: <email address hidden>
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:39:24 +0100
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Frank_K=FCster?= <email address hidden>
To: Florian Weimer <email address hidden>
Cc: <email address hidden>, Ralf Stubner <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: Bug#345604: ConTeXt documentation is non-free

Florian Weimer <email address hidden> wrote:

>> I guess the license is GPL-incompatible, but DFSG-free. And *that* is
>> not a practical problem, since nobody would want to reuse the code from
>> tex.web in a new project.
>
> But pdfTeX does, and it claims to be GPLed.

That's a good point - but this shouldn't be discussed on the teTeX
mailinglist, but with the web2c people (it's not an issue of pdftex
only, most current implementations of TeX on unix(like) or Windows use
web2c code which is GPL.=20=20

I cannot say anything here; I don't even know exactly why source code
under a BSD license can be included in a GPL project. But the license
of tex.web is liberal as soon as you rename it (it's in the public
domain AFAIK), and there's no need to rename it as long as the web2c
application passes the trip test...

Maybe you should ask Janet Casey from the FSF who has created the pdftex
entry in the Free Software Directory.

Regards, Frank

--=20
Frank K=FCster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Z=FCrich
Debian Developer