🚀 go-pugleaf

Several of your points in the following post have already been
countered, but nobody has touched on a few comments that I have.

In article <1991Jul28Su232915.Dan_Jacobson@ATT.COM> Dan_Jacobson@ATT.COM writes:
>As the GNU project uses TeX in its several TeXinfo-written manuals
>(e.g., the GNU Emacs Manual), I am curious how a GNU Project/Free
>Software Foundation viewpoint would see the TeX Users Group (TUG).  I
>know TUG does important work in charting the future path of TeX, etc.
>On the other hand one must pay a membership fee in order to access,
>say, their TUGBoat publication.  

One may also borrow it from a friend or library.  :-)  On a more 
serious note, I'm sure that TUG would give permission to reprint
selected sections of the TUGboat if you had good reason to do so.
If you wished to distribute electronic versions of the macros 
published in TUGboat, the chances are that you'd be urged on, as
it is only a lack of time on the part of key volunteers (and the
lack of new volunteers to do this specific task) that has kept
the macros from being nicely packaged and placed in all the 
regular TeX archives.

>One couldn't just FTP it and print it
>out. 

I see two implicit fallicies here:  1) FTPing is free and 2)
just because a publication is prepared with TeX one can simply
print the file and have oneself a copy.  

Typesetting, printing, and mailing a magazine 
is not free.  FTPing a magazine is not free.  If FTPing were
free, I would have connected the machine I'm writing this on
to the network long ago.  In the U.S., a meaningful connection
for FTPing starts at around US$1500/month.  Your employer pays
a lot more than that.  I will agree that the econonmies of 
scale work out very differently for the two methods of 
distribution, but that isn't the same as free.

The other problem is that TUGboat is not a single file that
can be printed out at whim.  Over the history of the journal,
parts of it have been Plain TeXed, parts have been LaTeXed,
and parts have been supplied by the authors as camera ready
copy (largely in the case where the article has been about
special fonts or graphical tools developed by the author).

> Would TUG be seen as "information hoarders"?

Possibly by somebody who doesn't have the foggiest idea of
what it costs to produce and distribute a journal of 
TUGboat's size.  It's unlikely though.
>
>Post rather than e-mail replies.

?

-- 
--Jon Radel                                jon@radel.com
  P.O. Box 2276                            uupsi!radel!jon
  Reston, VA  22090-0276
  U.S.A.