🚀 go-pugleaf

This note is a reply to Janusz Bien's feeling that TUG academic
institutional membership should be priced at a rate lower than the
corresponding number of individual memberships.

Historically the inequality has always been in the direction you now
see it.  Perhaps an argument for reversing this is that TUG's overhead
for membership service should be reduced by dealing in bulk, but the
true reduction in overhead would be very small and memberships have
never been entities which TUG has offered at quantity discount.
Instead, institutional memberships have been regarded as a different
form, and in certain ways a higher level, of support for TUG and the
TeX community.  Institutional members do get benefit of reductions for
TUG courses and meetings.  For those organizations balking at the fee
levels, we can offer just straight individual memberships.

Certainly one of the underlying issues here is the great difficulty that
our colleagues in eastern Europe have in coping with exchange rates
between their local currencies and currencies such as the US $.
While we can recognize the problem, developing a responsive and fair
solution is another matter.  This is an issue with which the TUG Board
is concerning itself now.