I have acquired the variety pack of RedHat 5.2, and with distress and unbelief have noticed that in a crass breach of all LaTeX licenses, the source code to the texmf tree is not present, neither on the i386 specific CD, nor on the SRPMS CD. I have searched all the available RPMs, to no avail. For your information: a working teTeX can be compiled by using the archive files teTeX-src-0.9-xxx (for compiling all binaries needed) and the texmf-tree available from teTeX-texmf-0.9-xxx. This is what is present in the Source RPM file of teTeX you deliver. But this does not contain any of the TeX/LaTeX sources from which the texmf tree has been compiled and extracted. *Those* are in tetex-texmfsrc-0.9-xxx which has not found its way anywhere onto your CDs. These sources are important for anyone that wants to locate and report bugs in the accompanying LaTeX styles and packages, or wants to use them as additional information. I would *strongly* recommend that you include this package as a noarch package. An SRPM does not really make much sense since the regular process of preparing a teTeX distribution (by anyone except Thomas Esser) does not need to convert this source tree into the corresponding texmf tree. I am not entirely sure whether there is a completely automated procedure to generate the teTeX texmf tree from the teTeX texmfsrc package. If there is, and you are short on CDROM space, you should probably package only texmfsrc in your SRPM (including apporpriate build procedures) instead of the compiled texmf tree. Distributing extracted LaTeX files without these sources is illegal. I have not yet notified either Thomas Esser as the author of teTeX nor the LaTeX team about this breach of license, since I feel that it might be in the best interest of all parties involved if you just fixed this for the next release amiably *before* a stink gets raised. I am pretty sure that this ommision has been more or less by accident. If people find out that you have failed to include the stuff on later releases, but by now do, I guess few will complain. Of course, I would not mind if you sent me the sources which you have omitted from my RedHat 5.2 CD (and which still are missing from Rawhide, as far as I could notice) on a separate CD, so that I will not have to download 12MB that ought to have been included in my purchase in the first place. If you won't have such a CD ready until the stuff gets put on RedHat 6.0 CDs, I am willing to wait that long... All the best
These sources are included. You must look in /usr/share/tetex/ After doing diffs with the said package they are the same.
As far as I know latex is licensed under GPL. We packaged the original source files we used to produce the binary packages in the src.rpm found on the SRPMS. GPL requires us to ship all the sources used in building a package. For the purpose of this packages, precompiled binary fonts and styles packages separately are used as *sources* because they are available from the CTAN sites. I doubt that this is a breach of the license ------- Email Received From David Kastrup <dak.de> 03/11/99 04:53 -------
As you have discarded bug report #1453 in spite of me explaining in several Emails (see the entries in Bug #1453 email) that went largely ignored how you were in conflict with the various copyrights, I have notified Thomas Esser, the author of teTeX, of the situation. You can contact him at te.de if you still do not understand the implications of the GPL and the LaTeX licenses. As one reaction, he will be putting up a README shortly specifically for distributors that can't be bothered to either read or understand the licenses of the various files comprising teTeX at the teTeX ftp site. If you still choose to be in breach of the copyright on the entire LaTeX source distribution as detailed in the email I have already written on this matter, I will also notify the LaTeX project as main copyright holder on those pieces of software the license of which you choose to violate of your unwillingness to comply with the LaTeX distribution terms, and of your frivolous claim that the LaTeX source files are "font files", you do not consider complying with "font file licenses", anyhow, and that whoever wants to get the sources can get them elsewhere. I find it pretty disappointing to hear such a stance from RedHat, which I had previously considered to be a party more interested in adhering to the licenses of free software.
The current source rpm for tetx includes the latex texmfsrc tar archive if anybody wants to use it.