Re: STIX fonts for free mathematics - comments needed on draft license
On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 02:17:54PM -0400, Steven G. Johnson wrote:
> Dear Debian folks,
>
> I noticed something where your input may be important.
>
> As you may know, there is a major effort by a consortium of scientific
> publishers and organizations, called STIX, to produce a comprehensive
> royalty-free font for mathematical typesetting (with almost 8000 glyphs):
>
> http://www.stixfonts.org/
>
> These fonts are needed, for example, to fully support MathML in Mozilla
> (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/), which cannot currently
> bundle math fonts. (See also bug #146605).
>
> STIX is now almost complete, with the remaining 472 glyphs scheduled to be
> done by October 2005, and they have recently released a draft user license
> for comments:
>
> http://www.stixfonts.org/user_license.html
>
> Unfortunately, the license does not quite meet the free-software,
> open-source, or DFSG criteria. It allows you to add glyphs to the font, as
> long as you release the new font under a different name, but you cannot
> modify the existing glyphs (even if you rename the font).
>
> They are soliciting comments on the license (see above link), and I think
> it would be good for the FLOSS community to get involved (politely). The
> intentions of the STIX people seem good, and I'm hopeful that they can be
> persuaded that such license restrictions do more harm than good.
See :
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/08/msg00270.html
One week ago. I think the conclusion was that it is non free because there are
a set of unmodifiable fonts. Not sure if the above thread was forwarded back
to them though, or just debate in the empty.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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