Re: again with lyx/latex

[Thamer Mahmoud <thamer at newkuwait dot org>]

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