From Fedora Project Wiki

TexLive 2008 is a licensing nightmare.

Let me start putting facts on the table:

In texlive-texmf-20080822, there are three main directories:

texmf/ texmf-dist/ texmf-doc/

Assuming that texmf-doc/ is all documentation, I focused my initial audit on texmf/ and texmf-dist/.

texmf/ has 1269 files in it. texmf-dist/ has 58326 files in it.

I finished auditing texmf/. Of the files in there, I could not determine any licensing information for 615 (48.5%) contain no licensing information whatsoever. One file claims to be "BSD-style", but the license text is missing.

I've barely scratched the surface of texmf-dist, but I have already found:

  • texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/cs/* is under the BaKoMa-CM.Fonts license [1] which is non-free.
  • texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/IranNastaliq.ttf is non-free
  • texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/koodak.ttf is non-free, due to modification restrictions
  • texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/LateefRegOT.ttf is non-free
  • texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/royab.ttf is non-free, due to modification restrictions
  • texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/ScheherazadeRegOT.ttf is non-free
  • texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/terafikb.ttf is non-free, due to modification restrictions
  • texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/xepersian/terafik.ttf is non-free, due to modification restrictions

Also, given that the licensing information is almost never included in the texlive fonts themselves, nor is the documentation packaged next to the files, I have to try to unravel what file belongs to what documentation and make guesses about the licensing.

I have tens of thousands of files still to audit, just in this tarball, not even getting to the main texlive package.

There is a spreadsheet where I am attempting to track this here: http://spot.fedorapeople.org/texlive-20080822-audit.ods

Some of these may be able to be identified by going to:

http://tug.ctan.org/cgi-bin/ctanPackageInformation.py?id=XXX

and replacing XXX with dvipdfm, web3c, arabtex etc. However, we'll have to check that the files are identical.