nonfree
tree?nonfree
tree born.
From the start, the nonfree
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.
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’s coverage of CTAN is good (and slowly improving),
the general rule for distributors has become
“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’t think of distributing it”.
(The catalogue only has a modest
list of licences, but it covers the set used
by packages on CTAN, with a wild-card “other-free
”
which covers packages that the CTAN administrators believe to
be free even though the authors haven’t used a standard licence.)
nonfree
tree is being
dismantled, and its contents moved (or moved back) to the main
CTAN tree. So the answer to the question is, now, “the
nonfree tree was a part of CTAN, whose contents are now in
the main tree”.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=nonfree