Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mailrus!ames!purdue!haven!uvaarpa!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
From: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Licensing fees for Tex?!
Message-ID: <1167@sas.UUCP>
Date: 27 Aug 89 01:34:18 GMT
References: <8210007@hp-lsd.HP.COM>
Reply-To: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Organization: SAS Institute Inc, Cary NC
Lines: 23

In article <8210007@hp-lsd.HP.COM> davek@hp-lsd.HP.COM (Dave Kumpf) writes:
|I was reading an old Seybold Report last night and encountered the following
|statement:
|
|"Knuth's source code for Tex has been published by Addison-Wesley (Reading,
|MA) and can be licensed for commercial purposes at nominal cost from the
|American Mathematical Society (Long Island, NY)."
|
|(The Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing, April 4, 1988, p. 12)

Don't worry.  This is just plain wrong.  TeX--the algorithms, the code,
the ideas, &c. is in the public domain.  The only restriction is that the
name "TeX" is reserved to those that have passed the "trip" verification
test.  That's it.  No fees, no royalties.

(Well, actually, rights to *print* the code are also reserved, since it is
released as a book, but this is presumably not relavent to the current
context.  It might, however, explain the confusion.)
-- 
-- Brian, the Man from Babble-on.		...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
--
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part
that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" -- THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS