On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 11:55 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor
<dkg@fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
Package: fontforge
Severity: serious
On 03/03/2012 07:48 AM, Nicholas Bamber wrote:
We have a package libimager-perl where we have had to remove a few
adobe-related test files as being non-DFSG. See
http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/TONYC/Imager-0.88/adobe.txt .
However given a comment in the latest version's changelog:
" - note that the generator of the apparently non-DFSG-free postscript
in MMOne.pfb is a Debian package."
by which he means fontforge. I intend to email to the author and assure
him that this is a purely precautionary measure on our part and that the
functionality of the package is not inhibited.
However since fontforge has been roped into the issue I wonder what you
guys think.
Hi Nicholas--
Thank you for raising this issue. I just did a bit of research to try to figure out what this is about.
In fontforge, it appears that this code is embedded in fontforge/othersubrs.c
The originals of several of these functions seem to appear (with non-DFSG-free licensing) in the appendices of
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/5015.Type1_Supp.pdf
In particular, the licensing says:
This code, as well as the code in the following appendices, is copyrighted by
Adobe Systems Incorporated, and may not be reproduced except by
permission of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Adobe Systems Incorporated
grants permission to use this code in Type 1 font programs, as long as the
code is used as it appears in this document, the copyright notice remains
intact, and the character outline code included in such a font program is
neither copied nor derived from character outline code in any Adobe Systems
font program.
This license looks pretty non-DFSG-free to me, and it applies at least to the makeblendedfont array in fontforge/othersubrs.c.
Even more depressing, the makeblendedfont array in othersubrs.c actually has a modified comment (correcting a mistakenly copy/pasted buggy comment from the code in the PDF!) which potentially means that it is itself in violation of Adobe's restrictive license.
This is not such big issue in that it is just a matter of getting Adobe to produce a corrected version - could you state exactly what change needs to be made.
I'm not really sure what to do about this other than to open an RC bug against fontforge, which this e-mail should do :(
We could probably make a new dfsg-free "clean" upstream tarball that is still capable of building fontforge binaries by ripping out big chunks of this file (i haven't tried it yet), but i don't know what that would do to fontforge's ability to do Type1 font generation.
I someone could try this its worth see what the resulting difference is.
Another approach would be to move fontforge from the main archive to the non-free archive; but it seems like that would relegate many of our font packages to contrib, due to build-dependencies. :(
In the past I have seen US and NUS versions of fontforge. The solution would therefore seem to produce a dfsg free version of fontforge which stays in main, albeit with somewhat reduced.
John
I'm open to other suggestions; i would be overjoyed, in fact, to hear other suggestions. Does anyone have any proposals?
--dkg
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