Re: Re: Revisiting inclusion of AcroTeX/eForms in TeX Live in light of advancements in libre PDF readers

    all the features that are used by pgfplots are now supported by at
    least pdf.js which is under an open- source license (Apache-2.0).

In principle, of course the licensing question is not about "features
used by pgfplots", but everything in acrotex et al., and whether any
features that require acrobat specifically are feasibly separable in
installation. I suspect there are some.

But, let's ignore licensing questions for a moment. There is another stopper.

    Could you therefore please include the acrotex package in TeX Live?

acrotex.ins generates runtime files with quite generic names, such as
"web.sty", "taborder.sty", "eqno.def", and a couple dozen more.

The rule has always been that runtime files have to be uniquely named,
with some sort of package prefix or abbreviation.

I am not willing to let any package own an extremely generic filename
like web.sty at this late date.

Unfortunately, Dr. Story died several years ago, he was not interested
in cooperating with TeX Live while he was still actively developing his
packages (his summary to me on the subject was, "please don't include my
packages in TeX Live"), and no one has come forward to maintain his
packages (unfortunately but not surprisingly).

There is plenty of great stuff in Story's work, but I just don't see how it
can be reasonably included in TL at this point.

If pgfplots finds this critical, maybe you can take the time to extract
out the parts you need into a new and maintained package with reasonable
names. --best, karl.