Re: Licence for free ttf fonts - open source enough?
On Fri, Oct 12, 2001 at 02:36:29PM -0500, David Starner wrote:
> Many other art forms have been free. Legends, tales and jokes have been
> free for the history of mankind. Most of the art that Debian will be
> concerned with has high craftmanship aspects, which would lead me to
> hope that it would be more likely to be free. IMO, the reason so many
> fonts aren't free, is cultural; the font community has non-free license
> norms, like the MS-DOS/Windows programming communities (especially
> pre-97 or so.) Note the large number of free MetaFont fonts. We just
> need to convince font people that they should release under free
> licneses.
Fonts need to be allowed to be modified. If the license requires a
changelog, or a pointer to the unchanged original, or something like
that, that's fine (I guess?).
Fonts are on the one hand art, on the other useful tools.
I'm digging RMS when he says that things like datafiles for games, or
books, need not in all cases allow modifications.
I don't feel "guilty" for playing a game with somewhat non-free sound
effects (as long as the sound effects may be converted to any format
or other practical things like that are covered).
Oh. Now I let my mind wander again. Anyway, what I was going to ask is
this: is there a "recommended license" for fonts in Debian? Is the
Arphic license okay? (A quick glance through it seems to say yes.)
I want to know - in case I ever get to talk to a person holding
copyright on fonts, or if I should make my own fonts someday in the
extremly far future.
Sunnanvind
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