Comment 45 for bug 27858

Norbert Preining <email address hidden> wrote:

> On Mon, 03 Apr 2006, Ralf Stubner wrote:
>> Most of the work on tetex-doc-nonfree was done before the GR on GFDL. At
>> that time, it seemed pretty clear that any GFDL licensed document would
>> have to go to non-free. Most of the discussion is in #345604. After the
>> unexpected outcome of the GR, I am not sure if we should jump to
>> conclusions already and move the files back.
>
> Aehhe.. do you expect a new GR???

If anything, a decision by the ftpmasters that they cannot guarantee the
requirements in the "Copying in quantity" clause or the anti-DRM clause
on Debian machines.

>> > > . Why is fontinstallationguide in tetex-doc-nonfree? In TeX live there
>> > > is a source code which is GFDL/Debian [1]. Maybe it is not the
>> > > exact source code? Then it would be better to compile this source code
>> > > and include the output, or?
>>
>> Here we have the additional problem that the PDF uses non-free fonts.
>
> Hmmm, now it is getting interesting. Do we consider FREE also the LAYOUT
> of a document????
>
> Ie it is necessary to recreate the *VERY SAME DOCUMENT*, even from the
> layouts point of view, on any system?
>
> I would say no, because everyone can reUSE the text in any way, and he
> can recreate the same layout by buying fonts, but it is not necessary to
> reuse the text, change the layout etc.
>
> So this is no contradiction for me to DFSG.

I've brought this up on -legal a couple of weeks ago (because of the
fontinst documentation), and the bottom line is: If we have the fonts
and they are free, we can distribute the document as-is. If we don't
have them, it's just the same as if a program ships as C-source plus one
precompiled binary blob (except that in this case we don't even have the
isolated binary blob, just the resulting compiled "binary"). And such a
program would for sure be non-free.

What we can always do, of course, is recreate the document from the
sources with an appropriate free font; but as long as it's distributable
and we do have tetex/texlive-doc-nonfree, anyway, I'd just put it in
there.

Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)