TeX License Auditing

Rationale

Both teTeX and ?TeXlive are big collections, itself distributions put together from individual packages on CTAN (ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/). Upstream (Thomas Esser who put together teTeX, and the TeXLive team) do share Debian's view on Free Software (except maybe for documentation issues), but there might still be files included that are non-free or are intended to be free, but don't have a proper license statement. The reason is mostly historical - in the old days, both upstream and individual package authors didn't care about these things as they should have. And TeX has grown for a long time...

In the past, the Debian teTeX packages have been audited for license freeness at least once. However, this has been done on a per-CTAN- package basis (and even that, perhaps, not too systematically), not on a per-file basis. Furthermore, the process of auditing has not been documented. Therefore, it is not possible today to check which parts were included and checked back then.

As a consequence, we have decided to do it systematically this time, and to keep information about which files are associated with a particular package, which license they're under, and where this information can be found.

While we are doing this, we will probably find files with unclear licenses, research old CTAN copies, contact upstream authors, etc. Information about this will be collected here.

Auditing Process

The auditing process is described in tetex-base's copyright file (copyright.headers in the source package), here, and in particular in file://usr/share/tex-common/tpm2licenses.README.

If you want to help, read it, and claim a package below.

Package Claims

To prevent duplication, people should "claim" the tpm files they want to work on in the following list

List of problematic Packages

The list of ProblematicCtanPackages is kept separately.

List of open bugs

Here is a list of AccumulativeLicensingBugs.

-- ?FrankKuester 2006-05-16 15:40:39