Le Mer 23 juillet 2008 13:00, Vasile Gaburici a écrit : > > What are the implications of a GPL'd pdf? Having to give the (LaTeX or > whatever) source? Having to allow others to modify said source? I think the implications are mostly you can not tell someone "here is my pdf document, you can look at it but I don't allow you to pass it to someone else". In many use cases this is not what the pdf creator wants when choosing to embed a font in a random document. What all that means is that vanilla GPL is a bad font license, and the FSF has yet to spend the time to write an authoritative font license. SIL did and that's why we recommend the OFL to font projects, even though I'm personnaly not comfortable with all SIL choices. But it beats the legal mess GPL font projects can become (Liberation is a good example of this). Junk licensing : - Bistream Vera - Liberation (one-shot licenses with little thought to reuse, good enough for shipping in Fedora but not really suitable for reuse by new projects) Software licenses bent out of shape to sort of apply to fonts - GPL + font exception - GUST license either way the result is not too convincing. Having to deal with licenses is bad enough without needing to sieve through difficult to read patched licenses. Font-oriented licenses: - OFL - DSL (marginal use) The OFL has clearly been written with the font context in mind, and for this reason is much better than all of the above (and we recommend it). Its main faults are not in the execution, but in the balance between original author and downstream rights. It's not as symmetrical as GPL is for software. The LGPL seems not to suffer from the GPL problems when applied to fonts (but I've not done a deep analysis, IANAL). Strangely enough it's rarely used and Free Software oriented projects seem to prefer the GPL, which forces us to do the "please add the FSF font exception" circus. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot _______________________________________________ Fedora-fonts-list mailing list Fedora-fonts-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-fonts-list
