Re: nonfree(?) fonts in xfonts-100dpi &c
Hi dine,
I considered this issue back in the day as package maintainer.
In the United States and some other jurisdictions, possibly not
including Japan[1], bitmap typefaces are not regarded as
copyrightable. In fact, typefaces generally aren't--but the "font"
that creates them in the form of instructions in a sort of programming
language, often are.
As I understand it, in the West the reasoning is based on analogy to
and the precedent of hot-metal typography, whereby you could purchase
a "font" from some foundry and rack it in your Linotype, for example.
By contrast, if a person studied a font in a newspaper or book closely
and cast his own hot-metal font to simulate it, that person enjoyed
independent commercial rights.
Donald Knuth, for example, famously designed the Computer Modern fonts
based on reference to typefaces traditionally used in mathematical
typesetting.
Let me know if you have further questions or if this fails to
illuminate the issue.
Regards,
Branden
[1] I did some limited research on this potential exception. It seemed
to involve only glyphs used in Japanese typography (hirigana,
katakana, and kanji) and explicitly _not_ Western scripts (romaji). At
the time, the Lucida fonts didn't have renderings for any of these
codepoints, and my guess would be that they still don't, as my
recollection is that those fonts have been close to moribund ever
since they landed in the X Window System distribution. Maybe the Euro
sign got added, and I wouldn't count on much more than that. Scalable
fonts have been where the action is for over 25 years. The bottom line
is that we had no bitmap fonts with "Japanese characters" with a
non-free license, and no bitmap fonts without them that had a license
that was binding.
On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 2:08 PM, dine <2500418497@qq.com> wrote:
> Hi. I just spot an issue in xfonts-100dpi, xfonts-75dpi, and related
> packages: some of the fonts are free, but the Lucida bitmaps do not allow
> modification, the same reason the Luxi fonts got marked nonfree 15 years
> ago. Does Lucida need similar treatment?
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