Great fonts for GNOME - but can we use them with Debian?
GNOME/Bitstream agreement (compatible with DFSG?) - Debian Planet
Debian has quite strict rules about what constitutes a free package which can be part of the main distribution of GNOME. There has been a lot of fuss recently (most of which being inside my head, I haven’t seen other reactions, but I am sure most would think similarly) over Bitstream’s licensing agreement with Ximian.
I never imagined that the licensing might not be free, until I found a commentary about it at Debian Planet. And it does appear that they can’t appear in your favourite distribution.
The licensing is obviously meant to allow the fonts to be used in a software distribution, but not sold just on their own - people just looking for new fonts for their system ’should’ purchase them from Bitstream. But it does as a result mean that the fonts cannot be packaged on their own.
So the result is: it’ll either go into non-free, or else Bitstream will need to reconsider.
January 28th, 2003 at 2:51 pm
As quoted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines, further down on that page,
“The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.”
It shouldn’t be a problem. “The fonts cannot be packaged by themselves for sale …” So, they can be packaged by themselves gratis, or can be packaged as part of other software for a fee)
January 28th, 2003 at 3:22 pm
Intriguing. I think the licence goes against the spirit of item 1 of the DFSG, “Free Redistribution”, even if it agrees with all the individual items. I have a feeling (but I wouldn’t know for sure) that the writers of the document failed to put in this particular condition as it never occurred to them that it might happen.
January 30th, 2003 at 2:29 pm
My feeling isn’t that at all; the case with quite a few of the LaTeX and TeX packages available is that they have similar, or stricter (think “no commercial use”) conditions on further redistribution, and Bruce Perens would have been aware of that sort of licensing, and worded the licence to include them.
The reaction to the improvement and repackaging of public domain or Berkeley licenced software as commercial, closed software spawned licences that were even more, umm, jaundiced-with-regard-to-commercialism than the GPL. Remember Linus’ original Linux licence?
(Okay, no, I wasn’t there either.)