Hello all, I doubt most of you know or care about George Douros' family of fonts, as almost all of them are quite niche. However, there is one font in particular, Symbola, that a number of users and packagers care for, since it follows closely all the Unicode additions and improvements. A few of weeks ago, the creator of the fonts took down his web page and along with a message about the site being under reconstruction, there is now this: "Software on this site is free strictly for personal, non-commercial use." In the past, in lieu of a license, he had this piece of text: "Fonts and documents in this site are not pieces of property or merchandise items; they carry no trademark, copyright, license or other market tags; they are free for any use." The previous wording essentially put the fonts in the Public Domain - perfectly acceptable for inclusion in Fedora. That change raised some red flags, so I contacted him about it and we exchanged a couple of messages. Nothing is set in stone yet, but some time soon he is going to upload a whole new license text (hopefully in English), probably something custom-made. Along with the fonts, there will probably be some sort of software, hence its mention. Apparently he is not hostile to linux distros redistributing his fonts, but he took issue when I pointed him to our licensing pages and he did call redistributors and font web sites "license pushers" (at times he is a bit temperamental like that). I asked him if the new license will cover redistribution in a distro context specifically, but he has not replied yet (I suspect he is away on Easter holidays). With all that in mind and while I wait for the license text, I have a few questions: - Am I right to assume that "free strictly for personal, non-commercial use" is incompatible with our guidelines? - If it is indeed incompatible, would trying to convince him to adopt a dual license scheme be the best course of action? - If the new license prohibits us from distributing the fonts, do we need to drop the packages from Fedora or can we continue to use their current versions? - Finally, if everything fails, is there a suitable and equivalent replacement for Symbola? Best regards Alex _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
