Re: What to do when the LaTeX sources are missing, but an XML equivalent was rewritten from scratch ?
Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> writes:
> On Mo, 19 Nov 2007, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> In the absence of an explicit copyright license, Debian has generally
>> taken the conservative position that just because something is
>> available for download doesn't grant an implicit license, and hence
>> doesn't mean that you can redistribute it or make any derivative work
>> from it (including extracting pieces of it).
> Assume that author X bought the fonts, embedded them into a document and
> put an article using these fonts on his web page with the statement: The
> document is free to use and distribute. The author is acting strictly
> conforming to the license granted to him by the font company.
If that's the case, then that's great. As a paranoid Debian package
maintainer, I'd prefer it if upstream would include a copy of the license
granted by the font company.
Of course, that free to use and distribute is not sufficient for Debian
main. They would also have to grant a license to create derivative works
and distribute those derivative works, including the derivative work of
extracting the fonts and distributing them alone. That's why I'd like to
see the original font license so that it's possible to verify that the
correct rights are granted.
If that isn't possible, I think it's kind of a murky area. I'm not sure
I'd support going on a crusade against such documents, but I'd much rather
see all documents in Debian have a clear provenance, including being built
from fonts in Debian.
(Full disclosure: one of my packages has PDF files with no source because
the source has been lost and not even upstream has anything but pure PDF
files. I gave it a lot of thought before including them. They're the
only available documentation of certain protocol issues, so they're
useful, but I'm still not clear on whether they're really DFSG-happy.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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