[Fedora TeX Live] TeXLive inclusion in Fedora - timeline?

[Tom Callaway]

On 09/23/2011 11:04 AM, Michael Ekstrand wrote:
> On 09/23/2011 09:44 AM, Tom Callaway wrote:
>> On 09/22/2011 06:16 PM, Jussi Lehtola wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>>
>>> the status page at
>>>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive
>>> hasn't been updated in a year.
>>>
>>> I'd like to know when I can expect the new TeXLive packaging to appear
>>> in Fedora. I guess Fedora 16 is out of the question; will TeXLive be in
>>> time for Fedora 17?
>>>
>>> The status page states that the inclusion process is 60% complete.
>>
>> FWIW, I think the legal issues are still a giant roadblock. I admit to
>> not having time or energy to tackle things in that area lately, but it
>> probably makes sense to generate a new spreadsheet style table of the
>> texlive components for tracking, something like:
> 
> High-level, what are the legal challenges for TeXLive?  My understanding
> is that one of the major benefits of TeXLive is that its components have
> been reviewed for free licenses.

This is a common misunderstanding. The three main problems with TeXLive are:

1) Items marked as "distributable" which have no clear licensing.
2) Items marked as "public domain" which have no clear licensing (or no
licensing at all), or are works placed in the public domain by
individuals in jurisdictions (such as most of Europe) who cannot abandon
their copyright.
3) Items marked as being under a free license, but are either mismarked
or there is no evidence to back up the texlive claim.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Talk:Features/TeXLiveLegalAudit is the
latest status, but its a bit out of date at this point.

In that old list, there were 41 items with non-free licenses, 8 items
where the licensing is unclear (aka we're not sure if the license is
free or not yet), and 130 items where the license is simply unknown.

But as I said before, we need to make a new list based on the latest
texlive and update the status.

~tom

==
Fedora Project