[Pkg-fonts-devel] Talking with an upstream about changing his license
Dear people,
I am glad to now become part of the pkg-fonts team and I have already
checked out the whole subversion repository to ease collaboration
(actually, I'm now converting it, with the help of git svn, to a git
repository, so that I can work offline---and I will be on vacations
this next week).
Anyway, one the fonts part of things, I am interested in packaging an
old-style font (similar to Bembo) and I found one that is still under
development, but that doesn't have a free license.
Here is a snippet of a private conversation with upstream:
> I'm glad you find XXXXXXX appealing and worthy of inclusion in Debian. You
> ask about modifying the license. I'm assuming that the license for anything
> included in such a distribution would authorize anyone to do anything they
> wanted with the software (modify it, etc.). Is there any prohibition aginst
> redistributing it, particularly for commercial purposes?
It may not be apparent from this brief passage, but I get the feeling
that upstream is not exactly opposed to releasing his nice work as
Free Software.
Of course, having it package in non-free is better than not having it
and, if we had it packaged and distributed there, I think that that
would be a good starting point so that he would see his opus used and
have a personal satisfaction with his work of love and that could mean
that he would see the benefits of releasing his work as Free Software
in a latter release.
With that said, what would be a recommended course of action here?
Thanks, Rogério Brito.
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org
Reply to: