On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Historically it was quite widespread. The only bit of font metadata one > could rely on was the font name, and then not always. A font author would > widely announce the relicensing of his font and not change the metadata in > the font files. Even Google Droid had rotten licensing metadata when it > was first released IIRC Google still seems to be the worst offender in my search thus far. :-/ > However there has been quite a lot evangelization about this issue in > free/open font circles those past years, so the situation may have > improved > >> (I'm going to run a script to check soon; I'm >> downloading 300MB worth of fonts right now. ;-) And the results are in... There are 80 fonts in 28 packages that have neither the "copyright" (name ID#0) nor "license description" (#13) field populated. [1] There are additionally 252 fonts in 128 packages that don't set the "license description" field while setting the "copyright" field. [2] These are probably fine, but we might want to take a look over them anyway. (There are none with a description but no copyright.) Finally, 880 fonts in 402 packages don't set the "license URL" (#14) field, but this definitely isn't a blocker. [3] >> AFAICS it shouldn't be too hard to script up something so this would >> as easy as `fixfontmd --copyright "$(head -n3 LICENSE)" --licensedesc >> "$(cat LICENSE)" --licenseurl "http://example.com/LICENSE"` for >> packagers. >> >> I'd be happy to add a guideline for this and fix up existing packages >> if this seems amenable. > > If you can write a tool that makes it easy to fix opentype licensing > fields at build time, I'll be delighted to support any guideline change > that mandated its use. However if you go in this direction please check on > the fonts and openfontlibrary list knowledgeable people agree there are no > wrong side-effect (this will reach debian font packagers at least BTW) Thanks, will do when I have something concrete to show. The fontTools library underlying the "ttx" tool seems to make this kind of stuff pretty easy. (I used it to perform the query above.) I'm hoping it won't mangle the fonts into oblivion. ;-) -T.C. [1] http://patches.fedorapeople.org/js-repoqueries/fonts-neither [2] http://patches.fedorapeople.org/js-repoqueries/fonts-nodesc [3] http://patches.fedorapeople.org/js-repoqueries/fonts-nourl -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
