[Hamish, there is some material that may be of interest to you about 35 lines down.] On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 03:47:41PM +1000, Drew Parsons wrote: > Someone raised the question of whether Xprint font files need to be > removed, probably in 2002 as Roland said. I asked Roland about it and he > replied they were under the same X11 licence as the other files. I > accepted this and didn't pursue the question further. > I can't find the discussion archived, it may have been a private > correspondence with Roland. The guts of the argument were the same that > Roland is presenting here. I hope his reply to you on Saturday has > convinced you. I'm sorry it has taken me a while to get back to this. On Sat, Oct 09, 2004 at 09:33:58AM +0200, Roland Mainz wrote: > Branden Robinson wrote: > > Your reasoning seems to be grounded on a couple of problematic premises: > > * That font metric information isn't copyrightable. This may be true in > > the United States, but one of the big reasons Debian still has a non-free > > section is because Adobe in Japan asserts copyright over just this sort > > of thing. > > Again, this does not cover the PMF files. The original files have been > commited by Hewlett-Packard under the MIT/X Consortium license many many > years ago (and the files for the Postscript DDX were later refreshed by > me to fix a minor bug - and I committed them under the same license: > MIT/X.org). The so-called "copyright" notice in these files is just an > attribute which informs the application that the attribute "COPYRIGHT" > has a value. But this value does not relicense the file itself away from > the MIT/X.org license. That would be the same as "relicesing" this email > just because it references the string. Okay, I'll take your word for it on this part. > References or index data of this kind cannot be copyrighted, neither in > the US nor in Japan nor elsewhere in the world. I am afraid I'm not persuaded here, but I'm not really the person to argue with about it. Hamish Moffatt, who maintains xpdf-chinese-simplified, xpdf-chinese-traditional, xpdf-japanese, and xpdf-korean, is. If you're right, that'd be great. If I understand correctly what is keeping those packages in Debian non-free, then maybe we can move them to Debian main. In any case, if you're right about the blanket submission of the "original files" under the MIT/X Consortium license, then the issue is surely void. If they're not copyrightable, they're free for us. If they're copyrightable and MIT/X licensed, they're also free for us. > > I will try to find this discussion in Debian's list archives > > if you're interested. > > Sure. It may be possible that Adobe Japan did some tricky stuff with CID > fonts, but again this doesn't apply to something which has been > explicitly commited under the MIT/X.org license by the authors. I wish there were a historical record to refer to in this case, but as I said, I'll take your word for it until I hear a persuasive case to the contrary. Thanks for the explanation! -- G. Branden Robinson | Never underestimate the power of Debian GNU/Linux | human stupidity. branden@debian.org | -- Robert Heinlein http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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