[tex-live] Bug#477060: [Barbara Beeton] texlive license

[Frank Küster]

Dear Barbara,

long ago...

 Barbara Beeton <bnb at ams.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 18 Aug 2007, Karl Berry wrote:
>
>     [...]
>
>     I asked Barbara Beeton at the AMS about taking care of the pcatcode
>     madness, in hopes we can get a free version shortly.  I'm sure they did
>     not intend the current situation.
[...]
> the rest of amsrefs will be modified similarly,
> as will all ams-latex files, effective with
> the next regular update, expected (probably)
> sometime in 2008.

There is also the other issue of the unclear license state of
amslatex[1].  Can you already tell us whether this will be sorted out in
time for the 2008 update?  

Im asking in particular because the policy of our Debian release team
makes me a bit nervous: They happily accept packages with yet-to-clarify
licenses if the upstream maintainer has agreed to clear things up, and
they already did this when we released "Debian etch 4.0" in
2006. However, they except that things should be sorted out in the time
it takes Debian to prepare a new release. These two years are now nearly
over, and well, I fear they might not allow us to include amslatex in
our TeXLive Debian packages - which would be extremely regretful.


I would be glad if you could give us some information what your plans
are,

Frank


[1] as we discussed earlier, the main license text has ambiguous wording
regarding modifications, and there are a couple of files under unclear
licenses. 
-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)