TeXlive 2008 in Fedora 11?

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Thu Jan 29 19:32:43 UTC 2009


On 2009-01-29 at 13:35:50 -0500, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at>
wrote:
> Neal Becker wrote:
>> Really?  I've been reading the texlive list.  I noticed they have been
>> dropping many packages due to license issues.
> 
> That proves that TeXlive upstream cares about the licensing being Free
> Software, why can't we just trust them instead of redoing an audit at every
> single upgrade? We already did an audit when importing the 2007 version,
> for all other packages that's sufficient (in fact in most cases we trust
> the reviewer and don't even go through FE-Legal!), why not here?

Because we know it is bad.

Let me start putting facts on the table:

In texlive-texmf-20080822, there are three main directories:

texmf/
texmf-dist/
texmf-doc/

Assuming that texmf-doc/ is all documentation, I focused my initial
audit on texmf/ and texmf-dist/.

texmf/ has 1269 files in it.
texmf-dist/ has 58326 files in it.

I finished auditing texmf/. Of the files in there, I could not determine
any licensing information for 615 (48.5%) contain no licensing
information whatsoever. One file claims to be "BSD-style", but the
license text is missing.

I've barely scratched the surface of texmf-dist, but I have already found:

- texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/cs/* is under the BaKoMa-CM.Fonts license
  (http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/BaKoMa-CM.Fonts) which is non-free.
- texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/IranNastaliq.ttf is non-free
- texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/koodak.ttf is non-free, due
to modification restrictions
- texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/LateefRegOT.ttf is non-free
- texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/royab.ttf is non-free, due
to modification restrictions
- texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/ScheherazadeRegOT.ttf is
non-free
- texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/terafikb.ttf is non-free,
due to modification restrictions
- texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/terafik.ttf is non-free,
due to modification restrictions

I cannot find licensing for:
- texmf-dist/fonts/type1/arphic/*
- texmf-dist/fonts/type1/bluesky/*

Also, given that the licensing information is almost never included in
the texlive fonts themselves, nor is the documentation packaged next to
the files, I have to try to unravel what file belongs to what
documentation and make guesses about the licensing.

I have tens of thousands of files still to audit, just in this tarball,
not even getting to the main texlive package.

~spot




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