Re: Allegedly "open source" fonts and the DFSG
"Felipe Sanches" <juca@members.fsf.org> writes:
> As far as I can tell, the OpenType binaries have data structures that
> map 1:1 to their source project files,
I don't believe that is true at all! I'm not quite sure what you mean by
"source project files", to be honest. This is not about converting Type
1 or TrueType to OpenType: it's about whether any of these formats can
reasonably be considered source code, i.e. the preferred form for
editing the program.
> so it is trivial to regenerate the sources from the binaries.
Really? How, for example, do I generate the source code for the fpgm or
prep programs contained in the Droid Sans Mono binary?
I don't think it's trivial at all. It involves decompilation, just like
any other compiled binary program without its source code available.
> If there's any specific case in which this is not true, I'd be glad to learn about.
See the examples. The case of Noto Color Emoji is particularly clear,
since it is the repository itself that explains how to build the SVGs
from the "original Ai artwork" (their words, not mine) after,
presumably, editing said original artwork files. I don't know whether
those files contain additional valuable information beyond what is
available in the SVGs, perhaps comments or a modification history, but I
believe they do.
> Given that, I think the lack of sources in this case is OK, because it is trivial to recompute them.
I must insist it is not. But that's not sufficient, anyway: a
hand-written assembly program may be entirely re-derivable from its
assembled form, assuming there are no comments or non-standard
instruction mnemonics, but that doesn't make the binary the source code,
because no programmer would edit the binary directly rather than
reassembling it from a text file.
> Let me know if you have additional information.
I'm not sure what information you require. Please let me know.
Pip
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