Re: Please check draft font license for StixFonts - is it suitably free?
* Simos Xenitellis:
> In materialising this into a concrete suggestion, do you guys suggest
> something like:
>
> Change
> "3. The Font Software may not be modified or altered in any way, except
> that: (a) the Fonts may be converted from one format to another (e.g.,
> from TrueType to Postscript), in which case the normal and reasonable
> distortion that occurs during such conversion shall be permitted; and
> (b) additional glyphs or characters may be added to the Fonts, so long
> as the base set of glyphs is not modified or removed."
> to
> "The Font Software may not be modified or altered in any way, except
> that: (a) the Fonts may be converted from one format to another (e.g.,
> from TrueType to Postscript), in which case the normal and reasonable
> distortion that occurs during such conversion shall be permitted; and
> (b) additional glyphs or characters may be added to the Fonts."
> and the rest stays the same.
>From a free software point of view, the problems remain.
> Another suggestion would then be:
>
> "You may use the license that the Bitstream Vera fonts are distributed
> with, available at http://www.gnome.org/fonts/ (Section "Copyright").
> This license has already been approved by free and open source projects."
If I were you, I would include the license verbatim (copyright on the
license text permitting).
> All in all, I think we stand that
> http://www.stixfonts.org/user_license.html
> is equivalent with
> http://www.gnome.org/fonts/ (Copyright)
> apart from 3b which does not allow the potential modification of the
> base glyphs (characters).
> Right?
I think so, yes.
> An argument why 3b should be amended to allow modification of the base
> glyphs is that in practice there is little incentive to change existing
> glyphs.
Look at a few of Debian's gsfonts bugs to get a different picture.
(The "base set of glyphs" is not defined by the license, so we have to
assume that it applies to all characters.)
In addition, removing glyphs is a very common activity. For example,
if a copy of a font is embedded into a Postscript or PDF document,
typically only the subset which is actually used in the document is
included. As written, the license does not permit this.
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