Legal issues with new font guidelines

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Hi.

I was dutifully converting my font packages to the new guidelines,
when I ran into a possible legal issue.

For the sake of argument, let us assume a font licensed under OFL,
called Mardana. The upstream tarball has two families inside, Mardana
Sans and Mardana Serif, in TTF format. The text of the OFL license is
not included in the TTFs themselves, but in a separate text file in
the tarball. Actually, let's assume the TTFs themselves don't have any
copyright or licensing metadata.

According to the new font packaging guidelines, there would be three
packages, mardana-fonts-common, mardana-serif-fonts, and
mardana-sans-fonts. All documentation related files will be in
*-common, and all the actual TTFs would be in *-sans-* and *-serif-*.

So, someone finds about the fonts, wants to use them on Windows,
searches for them, and finds our binary RPM for Mardana Sans, and
downloads it. She then opens it with some tool and installs it on her
machine.

But that's a license violation by us:

"2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled,
redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy
contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be
included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or
in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or
binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user."

But we are not providing any copyright notice or license in our binary
RPM, that is supposedly the "software" that that Font Software is
bundled with. All we say, is two pointers: "OFL" in the RPM license
tag, and "mardana-fonts-common" in the requires tag.

Of course, if the user really wants to, she can investigate the binary
RPM, and find pointers to the actual license, and go and find the
license. But we would not be redistributing the license with "each
copy".

Please enlighten me.

Roozbeh

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