[Gnewsense-dev] Re: [bug #28597] TeX is missing

[Sam Geeraerts]

Richard Stallman schreef:
> I am sure there is a real problem with the Debian packages that make this
> necessary.  But just eliminating those packages is not much of a fix.
> TeX is needed for formatting GNU documentation.  It is vital for gNewSense
> to include a usable copy of TeX.  So if the Debian packages can't be used,
> we need other packages to replace them.
>
> Are people working on supplying valid TeX packages?

(Moving discussion to our development list.)

As I understand it, cutting out the non-free part (ams-latex) would make 
TeX a lot less usable in general. I don't know if that part is also 
required for the GNU documentation. As it's a core part of TeX, cutting 
it out without breaking the rest is rather difficult. We have nobody on 
the team who knows how to do that.

The issue is that ams-latex was released under a non-free license, but 
that was not intentional. We've been in contact with AMS (the copyright 
holders of ams-latex) about a license change. They agreed to adopt the 
LaTeX Project Public License for future version. We asked if older 
versions could be retroactively dual-licensed somehow, but didn't get a 
response to that (yet).