[tex-live] movie15 and media9

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/3/18 Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org>:
> On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 09:34:00PM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
>> Hi Mojca,
>>
>> >    "rm movie15, requires acrobat"
>>
>> I don't know the details, but if pdfs generated with movie15 can only
>> be properly viewed wirh acro*, then it is according to the policy to
>> remove it.
>
> Sorry, but this is nonsense. PDF is now an ISO standard, if FOSS reading
> implementation are currently lacking support of a certain feature, why
> this would be of a concern to TeXLive maintainers? As long as generating
> the document does not require a non-free software.
>
A few years ago I talked personally to Adobe chief programmer (when
they showed there products publicly in Prague). I asked why Adobe
Distiller is not available for OS/2 and whether they plan to do it. He
answered that the format is documented, all the books can be freely
downloaded so that anybody can make such a program. They even changed
the format because up to 1.2 PDF could only used patented LZW
compression. Adobe did not like it and introduced other compressions
in order to allow PDF creation by free tools.

>> We have removed several times packages that need non-free stuff to be
>> useful, and this policy will not change.
>
> They need the non-free stuff to *build* the document not for it to be
> viewed.
>
> Regards,
>  Khaled



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz