[tex-live] free software, DFSG

[Sebastian Rahtz]

David Kastrup wrote:

>Give the man a break.  He is one of the founding fathers of Computer
>Science.  
>
sure. he isn't infallible, though

>He writes mathematical books that are a joy to read.  
>
if you say so. not something of relevance to me.

> The main complaint I have about his dealing with TeX is
>that he let himself be persuaded to write TeX-3.x, creating a 90%
>there solution to 80% of its users that gives the illusion of being
>something more than a tool for typesetting TAOCP.  If he hadn't done
>that, perhaps the threshold of pain had carried through more serious
>changes to TeX.
>
yes, thats a fair argument.

> 
>Omega has more or less fallen victim to the "good enough for us"
>mentality
>
Omega is a  textbook example of a project which has done the wrong
thing is almost every conceivable way :-} One could write a book on open
source software development simply saying "dont do what Omega did"...

>I am working with all of the junk.  Who do I ask for new stuff?  I
>want John to get Omega into useful state.  It is a waste of resources
>to have LaTeX, PDFTeX, eTeX and others all forked off from something
>which does not even deal with character sets in a sane way.
>Guiseppe's Aleph is at least an attempt to get something workable
>again, but of course it misses PDFTeX functionality.
>
>  
>
maybe we'll have to rest all hope on Thanh.

>Maybe one day TeXlive will come without TeX.
>  
>
now there's a good idea!

sebastian