Bug#732440: ghostscript: Error: /typecheck in /findfont

[Chris Liddell <chris.liddell@artifex.com>]

On 07/01/15 21:06, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
> Le mercredi, 7 janvier 2015, 12.17:43 Jonas Smedegaard a écrit :
>>> This is fixed in upstream's 9.14. I'll see with the release team if
>>> we can backport this into Jessie.
>>
>> Great.  But what about its licensing?  I guess upstream treat it as
>> AGPL, so we may risk disagreeing with them if we choose to ignore that
>> - e.g. by treating it as too small to be copyright-protected.
> 
> Best is to ask I guess. Let's try to see what the upstream author of the 
> patch says. Hereby CC'ing him.
> 
> Chris: We (Debian) want to include your patch for the Ghostscript bug 
> 695031 "don't assume we can read a font file", but we are wondering 
> about its licensing situation.
> 
> Debian is shipping ghostscript 9.06, licensed under GPL-3, but you 
> included this patch in ghostscript 9.14, which is licensed under AGPL. 
> 
> We have three options:
> 
> a) consider your patch as too small to be copyright-protected. This
>    would allow us to include is in GPL'd ghostscript 9.06. It'd be nice
>    to have your confirmation on this though.
> b) get your patch also GPL-licensed, allowing us to include it in GPL'd
>    ghostscript 9.06. It'd be mandatory to have an explicit statement
>    from you (as author of the patch) on that.
> c) None of the above, leaving the bug open for Debian Jessie, thereby
>    leaving our users with a bug in our next stable release. Needless to
>    say we'd prefer any of the two above solutions.
> 
> Cheers, and thanks in advance,

So, for clarity, that will be this commit:

http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git;a=blobdiff;f=gs/Resource/Init/gs_fonts.ps;h=8ab6872e

(or, for convenience: http://tinyurl.com/pvr4acp )

We'd have no problem with you patching an older, non-AGPL release with
that - we'd regard it as being covered by your "a" case above. It's also
a sufficiently obvious solution that any competent Postscript programmer
would almost certainly come up with the same solution, which would make
copyright enforcement decidedly questionable, too.

So go ahead and use that patch.

In the interests of the usual legal disclaimers, though, this only
applies to the particular patch linked above, so any other patches in
the future will need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

All the best,

Chris