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If picins is not free, why does it exist in MikTeX?

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    TexLive's team is strict, only packages with a certain kind of licence are accepted in TL. MikTeX and TeXLive are not equivalent. picins is free but I think it's a problem of licence – Alain Matthes Jun 07 '11 at 12:57
  • Note that in theory the licence conditions for inclusion in MikTeX are the same as for TeX Live, according to the first paragraph of http://miktex.org/copying (compare with http://www.tug.org/texlive/LICENSE.TL). However, examples such as this one show that this common policy is not as actively enforced in MikTeX as in TeX Live. – mpg Jun 08 '11 at 06:10
  • And btw picins is not free for any commonly accepted definition of free/libre software since you cannot modify it without author's permission and it doesn't even have a licence statement about distribution. – mpg Jun 08 '11 at 06:12

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It seems to be due to licensing issues and the package author being unavailable. See the following thread and especially the post in the link: [tex-live] picins is missing from tex-live .

Also, on why it's in MikTeX. On their homepage it doesn't say anything about the license of picins (it's silent about version and maintainer too). So, to connect with a comment above, it seems they are not as strict as TeX Live when it comes to these things.

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