Dear Martin,
let me add some more perspective and some numbers, since you seems to be new to this project and maybe unfamiliar with it.
You can check here some metrics:
TeXmacs has ~250.000 lines of C++ and ~200.000 lines of Scheme code. The great majority of this code has been written by Joris since 17 years:
I've joined the project in 2006 and I witnessed the constant work which Joris delivers in bugfixes, new substantial features, quality control over contributions by others, etc.. It is fair to say that a large community of users profits everyday from this work.
As for documentation we have a 260 pages user manual, a 50 pages developer guide and a 150 pages manual for the scheme extensions. All free and available in the program. There is a forum and a blog
with some tutorials.
Joris himself created also few video tutorials (the only one available so far), available on youtube and on our own web site.
So I find quite puzzling your critique, and frankly quite unjust. Maybe were you not aware of their existence?
I feel that Joris has the right to write and distribute whatever he likes, especially given the fact that his contribution to the project is already substantial without the book. I personally bought several copies to give as gift to friends.
I do not share the opinion of Alvaro that the book should be made free. The program is free software and everybody can write documentation, tutorials for it. Is not the obligation of Joris to do more than he already does and I'm quite fine with him publishing a great book for 50 euros, as I would be if he would publish a literary work with a standard publisher. You cannot compare a book with a small distribution like one on TeXmacs with a widespread book on Algebra used by many more students. As with other publications students can ask libraries to but the book, libraries which already have books on TeX and LaTeX which are similarly prices: Lamport's LaTeX book is $44 euros on amazon:
But, as everybody using TeXmacs regularly knows, you do not have to have the book to use it. Many of us learned to use TeXmacs before and without Joris' book. You can go in the forum and ask information, you can read the sources and see how to do something, you can read the blog for specific tutorials written by other collaborators like Giovanni.
TeXmacs is a great project I'm quite proud to contribute to. I never felt any problem with Joris' book.
Open source projects needs support and love from users which understand and value the dedication and hard work needed to make them successful.
Best regards, Massimiliano Gubinelli
I want to add perspective. TeXmacs provides unique functions on top of a fairly complete 'normal word processor'. Openoffice had at some point >100 paid programmers working on it [0] - for many years, Joris was able to provide most of the functionality, and then some more (remember TeXmacs is a typesetter), while essentially working alone and building a successful career as a mathematician. That he wrote extensive documentation along the way, always accessible from the program itself, available on the web (pdf, html) and increasingly complemented by discoverable, self-documenting interfaces, makes this feat even more impressive. TeXmacs is not one of those programs where somebody is having fun coding while neglecting documentation and expecting somebody to take care of it. Much to the contrary, TeXmacs is well-documented since the beginning, and all this documentation was always under free licenses.
Now, the conversation was rather concretely about Joris' recent book[1]. The book is a work of love to typography and scientific document creation, and gives some additional perspectives on TeXmacs, but while I enjoy reading it and learn new things, I recognise that most (all?) the practical information inside it was available in various ways already. I do welcome the prospect of the book being liberated in the future, but I also feel an overwhelming gratitude to Joris for all the work that he has done above and beyond what he needed for his own purposes -- in adapting the program and explaining it -- all in free terms.
We could have an abstract discussion and conclude that a restrictive copyright book is less desirable than a free book. This is also my viewpoint, and I wish that we all will buy that free edition just the same if/when it comes out, and also donate to the project [2]. But it would be ungrateful to forget that in this particular case, the author already made a long, consistent end exhaustive effort over years to document the program under a free license.
Best regards,
Álvaro.
StarDivision had 200 employees when sold to Sun in 1999; I later read this 100 figure about the Sun time but I haven been able to find a citation. Libreoffice started with >200 contributions, today they are countless.
Dear Joris,
On dimanche 20 juin 2021 11:26:58 CEST TeXmacs wrote:
> There is a fairly complete integrated manual that is also available in Pdf
> form from our website. Of course, further contributions are always welcome,
> also on other types of documentation such as tutorials or videos.
True.
Thank you Joris for your dedication to free software.
Hopefully others will reconsider whether pursuing this thread is the smartest move,
especially when the 2.1 release is so close.
Best regards,
Ederag
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