The CTAN team has, over the years, had requests to hold sample packages from, or limited-use versions of, commercial products. Because these may be of interest to our visitors, we have decided to try providing such a facility. We will be creating a new tree commercial/ in the near future.
Commercial suppliers of TeX-related material will be welcome to make submissions for such a tree via our usual upload mechanism. We expect to eventually migrate all of the shareware that we hold to this tree, as time permits.
We are aware of potential pitfalls arising from this expansion, so we wish to note two cautions.
(1) We cannot operate as a sales site. In particular, we are unable under any circumstances to take money for this service.
(2) All Internet users are aware of the explosion of programs that steal from users, whether by stealing personal information, or credit card numbers, or passwords, or by stealing the user's system resources. One reservation that we have is that a commercial/ tree would carry with it a greater potential for us to inadvertently add to this explosion.
Therefore, we retain the right to reject any materials that we judge to be malware, or to remove it from the archive when it is reported to us. Malware includes software containing viruses or trojans. It also includes spyware, i.e., software components that transmit personal or system information without knowledge or approval of the user. Judgement as to what software falls into this category will be at the sole discretion of the CTAN team.
Jim Hefferon for the CTAN team comments to: ctan (at) dante.de