Munzir Taha writes: > On Yaum al-Arbi'a 24 Thu al-Qi`dah 1425 4:10 pm, Thamer Mahmoud wrote: > > Munzir Taha writes: > > > On Yaum al-Ithnain 22 Thu al-Qi`dah 1425 7:04 pm, Yousef Raffah wrote: > > > > I have read on different web sites including the Arabic LyX HowTo on > > > > the documentation page about ArabTex, now is it required to have it in > > > > order for me to write documents/books or whatsoever in Arabic? > > > > > > Yes. > > > > But it's non free. From the arabtex.faq: > > > > [ArabTeX] is free for scientific and strictly private, noncommercial > > use. For commercial purposes you need a license agreement; inquire > > at the author's address. > > If this is the case, how come it's distributed with all Free GNU/Linux > distros?!
AFAIK, if the above quoted condition is still valid, than ArabTeX is non-free in the sense that you are not free to *use* it for writing commercial books or whatever. Distributing such a piece of software is a different matter. Restrictions like this render a software to be non-free because it does not meat the conditions of being free software. For example, see the DFSG (specifically item 6): http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines >I feel as if this has changed during the project life cycle but > they forgot to mention it ;) > This page mentions that debian considers this as non-free in woody: http://packages.debian.org/stable/tex/arabtex Not any more in Sarge: http://packages.debian.org/testing/tex/arabtex Perhaps this and other restrictions have been removed recently. If so, such a clause in the FAQ need to be removed as well. Regards, Thamer Mahmoud
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