[tex-live] Acrobat reader on DVD???

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Fri Sep 12 15:15:42 CEST 2003


    This week Hans Hagen suggested to put Acrobat Reader on DVD, i.e. for Linux, 
    Win and Mac. Hans also suggested to include version 5 and 6 for Windows as 
    well as some asian versions (what is needed?).

>From my reading of
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/distribute.html?readstep, you have
to explicitly make an agreement to redistribute acrobat binaries.  Don't
we want people to be able to make copies of the DVD at will?  That is, I
wouldn't want to distribute the DVD with a statement that says "oh, and
before you make a copy of this, you have to go fill out Adobe's form".

Their license agreement also has other conditions which seem
unacceptable to me, for instance, the "new versions" section says we
have to cease distributing version x within 6 months after version x+1
comes out.  We could not stop distributing TL2003 just because Adobe
comes out with a new version.

(I personally also find the "no reverse engineering" clause very
obnoxious, forcing us to give up our rights in advance.)

So for those reasons, I don't think we should do this.  Annoying as it
is for the users of the world.

karl


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