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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label whyfree</title>
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<h3>If TeX is so good, how come it&rsquo;s free?</h3>
<p/>It&rsquo;s free because Knuth chose to make it so.  He is nevertheless
apparently happy
that others should earn money by selling TeX-based services and
products. While several valuable TeX-related tools and packages are
offered subject to restrictions imposed by the GNU General Public
Licence (&lsquo;Copyleft&rsquo;), TeX itself is not subject to Copyleft.
<p/>There are commercial versions of TeX available; for some users,
it&rsquo;s reassuring to have paid support.  What is more, some of the
commercial implementations
have features that are not available in free versions.  (The
reverse is also true: some free implementations have features
not available commercially.)
<p/>This FAQ concentrates on &lsquo;free&rsquo; distributions of TeX, but we
do at least list the <a href="FAQ-commercial.html">major vendors</a>.
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whyfree">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whyfree</a>
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