Re: firefly fonts & CJKUnifonts
On Sat, 19 Feb 2005, Ming Hua wrote:
This is great news, and as a simplified Chinese user I am excited about
this as well. My question however is about the license of this font.
If I recall correctly, Arphic fonts require derived fonts to be in
Arphic license as well, which means Arne's font is going to be under
Arphic license.
Yes, the CJKUnifonts are under APL, please see CJKUnifonts website:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fCJKUnifonts
But Firefly's pixmap fonts are under GPL. And Arphic license is NOT GPL
compatible. Since we can't do anything about Arphic fonts, the only
reasonable solution would to be firefly dual-licensing his pixmap fonts
under APL/GPL, or put it under a more unrestrictive BSD-like license.
I guess Firefly doesn't understand the APL and GPL, so that's why he
did such big mistake.
I think we should correct Firefly's pixmap fonts are still under APL.
So now we have three situations:
1) Firefly fonts
Unclear License Statements.
2) Current CJKUnifonts
APL
3) Future CJKUnifonts(embedded Firefly's pixmap fonts)
APL
I don't see any problem for packaging CJKUnifonts even after merged
Firefly's pixmap fonts, that are still under APL.
I think Funda Wang raised this issue in Firefly's forum, but didn't get
a definitive answer. If I am missing something, pointers will be
appreciated.
I don't know what you guy asked and what he answered, but for my
experience, Firefly doesn't read any English. You guy should probably
write to him by Chinese for a better answer. :p
It may be not a big issue (I don't think Arphic is going to sue anybody
on these fonts), but the DFSG is important in Debian, so please consider
this when packaging.
The GNU web site said APL are still a free software license, please see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
Arphic Public License
This is a copyleft free software license, incompatible with
the GPL. Its normal use is for fonts, and in that use, the
incompatibility does not cause a problem.
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