Re: DFSG-freeness of the "CID Font Code Public Licence"
On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 08:58:18PM +0200, Adeodato Sim?? wrote:
> [Please CC on replies, M-F-T set accordingly.]
>
> Hello,
>
> I'd like an opinion about the DFSG-freeness of the "CID Font Code Public
> License", included below. A utility normally shipped with X11, mkcfm,
> was recently removed because the license was regarded non-free; this
> statement seems to come from Xorg upstream, see their Bug#5553 [1].
>
> [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5553
>
> One can find this utility shipped in Sarge's version of the 'xutils'
> package, and the full license included in its debian/copyright file,
> which makes me think the license has been ruled to be DFSG-free in the
> past.
>
> I took a quick look myself and, although I saw a couple of potentially
> problematic points, I'm more interested in -legal's assessment of whether
> this license surpasses or not the limits that are being applied to main
> nowadays.
Just a note: I had to make a judgement call on this one, since it wasn't
clearly non-free to me. In the end, because I'm not a fan of the
problematic clauses and the program in question was, aiui, for essentially
obsolete font formats, I decided to drop it.
In contrast, the license for the GLX implementation that we're shipping
also contains problematic clauses, but I'm not willing to yank it just yet.
The reason is because it's critical to the way people expect an X server to
work and there's no Free alternative. This obviously needs fixing (I'm
hoping someone who's interested in this problem would put the time in to
contacting SGI and trying to politely get it relicensed) and it's a far
more important licensing problem affecting the X codebase than the mkcfm
license.
- David Nusinow
p.s. Anyone reading this thread via MJ Ray's blog might want to note that
the mkcfm license issue doesn't affect the X server package so much as
xfonts-utils.
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