Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 12:54:14PM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * Theodore Ts'o (tytso@mit.edu) wrote:
> > You forgot one other thing.  We'll also have to strip **ALL**
> > **FONTS** from Debian, since fonts come in binary form, and we don't
> > have anything approaching the "preferred form for modification" for
> > fonts.  In particular, the Truetype Bitstream Vera fonts which were so
> > generously donated by Vera was generated not only using propietary
> > source files, but also using propietary non-free programs.  
> 
> Well, now, I'm not entirely convinced of this.  Could a similar argument
> not be used on JPEG's or PNG's?  Do we have *some* reasonable way to
> modify these fonts?  It's been a long time, but I did hack on some fonts
> a long time ago and while it wasn't the most fun thing I could have
> sworn there was a free program available to do it..

Ah, but I could hack around firmware using a hex editor as well.  The
question is whether or not a compressed PCF or truetype font file is
the "preferred form for modification" --- i.e., source.  If the
requirement is that "source" is available for all files shipped in
main, I don't see how we can include any of our fonts in the Debian
distribution.

						- Ted

P.S.  For non-x86 kernels, the kernel includes fonts for console
support.  So despite removing the firmware from the kernel, at least
for non-x86 kernels, we will probably need to move the kernel into
non-free as well.

Yay, rah.