[tex-live] booktabs.sty missing

[Lars Madsen]

On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 01:03:36PM +0200, Lars Madsen wrote:
> > 
> > is there no way around this problem?? A lot of people would be missing
> > that file.
> 
> sorry, its too late for TeX Live. anyone who wants packages with non-free
> licenses has to obtain them individually.
>  
> > I know that the author has vanished, say if he's dead than the booktabs
> > package just have to be forgotten or what??
> 
> well, actually, he has now finally been contacted, and the package
> can reappear. but yes, if he died the package would be frozen
> with the copyright statement he left in it, I guess. 
> 
> I know this all sounds ridiculous, but this is the rule we chose
> to play by several years ago. TeX Live claims to conform to the
> Debian free software guidelines, and I have to follow that
> once a problem has been found. Of course, all of TeX Live has NOT
> been checked properly, and I am sure you can find a bad package
> quite quickly, but in the case of booktabs the problem was caught
> in teTeX, so I had to act.
> 

good enough, we'll just have to remember telling people what to do when
they complain about the package not being there

but ofcourse we should be going towards the free software guidelines
perhaps some people should be looking into the other packages in order to
tjeck whether or not they have the right license

/daleif