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-<head>
-<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label nonfree</title>
-</head><body>
-<h3>What was the CTAN <code>nonfree</code> tree?</h3>
-<p/>When CTAN was founded, in the 1990s, it was unusual to publish
-the terms under which a TeX-related package was distributed (or, at
-any rate, to publish those terms formally).
-<p/>With the advent of the TeX <em>distributions</em>, however, people
-started to realise the need for such information, to protect those who
-create, distribute or sell the discs that hold the packages, etc.
-With the licence information available, the distributors can decide
-which packages may be distributed.
-<p/>The CTAN team decided that it would be useful for users (and
-distributors, not to say package authors) to separate packages that
-were candidates for distribution, and those that were in some sense
-&#8220;not free&#8221;. Thus was the <code>nonfree</code> tree born.
-<p/>From the start, the <code>nonfree</code> tree was controversial: the terms
-under which a package would be placed on the tree were hotly
-contested, and the CTAN team were only able slowly to populate
-the tree. It became obvious to the team that the project would never
-have been completed.
-<p/>The CTAN catalogue now records the nature of the licences of a
-good proportion of the packages it describes (though there remain
-several for which the licence is unknown, which is as good, for the
-distributors, as a licence forbidding distribution). Since the
-catalogue&#8217;s coverage of CTAN is good (and slowly improving),
-the general rule for distributors has become
-<blockquote>
-&#8220;if the package is listed in the catalogue, check there to see
-whether you should distribute; if the package is not listed in the
-catalogue, don&#8217;t think of distributing it&#8221;.
-</blockquote><p>
-(The catalogue only has a modest
-<a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/licenses.html">list of licences</a>, but it covers the set used
-by packages on CTAN, with a wild-card &#8220;<code>other-free</code>&#8221;
-which covers packages that the CTAN administrators believe to
-be free even though the authors haven&#8217;t used a standard licence.)
-<p/>There is a corollary to the &#8216;general rule&#8217;: if you notice something
-that ought to be in the distributions, for which there is no catalogue
-entry, please let the CTAN team (<a href="mailto:ctan@dante.de"><i>ctan@dante.de</i></a>) know.
-It may well be that the package has simply been missed, but some aren&#8217;t
-catalogued because there&#8217;s no documentation and the team just doesn&#8217;t
-understand the package.
-<p/>In the light of the above, the <code>nonfree</code> tree is being
-dismantled, and its contents moved (or moved <em>back</em>) to the main
-CTAN tree. So the answer to the question is, now, &#8220;the
-nonfree tree was a part of CTAN, whose contents are now in
-the main tree&#8221;.
-<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=nonfree">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=nonfree</a>
-</body>