🚀 go-pugleaf

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 couldn't just FTP it and print it
> out.  Would TUG be seen as "information hoarders"?
>
> [Perhaps this is a little different than the TeX and LaTeX books, as
> they have already been copyrighted years ago by their publishers, I
> presume, and could not as easily be legally, say, put under anonymous
> FTP next month.]

This question touches upon upon something I am curious about: Has
Knuth ever made public his motivations for freely distributing TeX and
METAFONT?  Aside from his evident altruistic considerations, were
there constraints imposed upon bringing TeX to the market by granting
agencies or the AMS?  (Is this any of my business? No, but I _am_ curious.)

It appears that this was a shrewd decision.  TeX is the standard or
preferred medium for many academic journals.  It's power, quality, and
price have made it ubiquitous in the demanding and penurious
academic/research environment.  This ubiquity must have fostered
not-insignificant sales of The TeXbook.

Would TeX have achieved these disparate accomplishments if it were
originally offered for sale at some unknown market price?
Mathematica, whose course seems to have been modeled after that of
TeX's (major software tool targeted at the researcher community, a big
Addison-Wesley book of instructions typeset in TeX, a users group with
its own journal), has been quite successful.  So far as I know,
Mathematica is not a research project in symbolic algebra the way that
TeX is in digital typography, but a comparison between these two
software products is illuminating.  It will be interesting follow the
longevity of software like GNU Emacs and TeX versus that of, say,
Mathematica.

Steven Smith