[Pkg-fonts-devel] license violations with embedded binary copies of GNU FreeFont?

[Paul Wise]

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Nicolas Spalinger
<nicolas_spalinger at sil.org> wrote:

> Don't you mean "bundling" instead of "embedding" in this situation?
>
> (Embedding is inclusion of the font in a document or file in a way that
> makes extraction - and redistribution - difficult or clearly discouraged

Yeah, I guess I mean bundling. The terminology I use here is
code-related ie "embedded code copies". In the font world I guess the
equivalent is bundling.

> I didn't take time to look at it in details (sorry, spare time is still
> a very scarce resource) but I'm fairly sure there are still many fonts
> under *GPL* without their source requirements satisfied both upstream
> and downstream. It would be useful to point out the issues to the
> maintainers so the bugs can be fixed. Many thanks for your efforts on this !

Ok, thanks for the encouragement.

> Also many of these fonts are still missing the font exception as a
> okay-ish workaround to the embedding issues. (As you can expect I'm
> recommend advocating a license with explicit coverage of the embedding
> issues!) So I think another key issue for us is to flag in the Debian
> archive is PDFs which embed fonts in breach of the license, probably
> unwillingly but still problematic. Licenses that don't allow embedding
> and propagate the copyleft and source requirements to the resulting
> document without the user's consent unfortunately easily create breaches
> of the author's chosen licensing.

I would think that detecting non-free and other fonts embedded into
PDFs is quite hard to do, do you have some thoughts on that?

On that topic, I wonder if we need a lintian complaint for fonts in
main that have restrictive bits enabled; no embedding/modifying etc.

> To help with this I'm working on a simple adaptation of our review
> script to analyse all pdfs in the archive and produce a report about all
> the fonts used. Basically it's exposing the output of pdfinfo and
> pdffonts (from poppler-utils) from all the pdfs. This should help us as
> a team to fix the situation. (we can look at other types of documents
> later on).

Interesting, I would suggest exposing that as links and todo items on
the PTS so we can spread around the work of fixing this stuff.

> But I have trouble accessing our svn with the new Alioth setup. Can
> someone in the team be so kind and explain how they've switched their
> access configuration or point me to the right docs? Thanks in advance.

The SSH host keys have changed.

Login via password is no longer enabled, need SSH keys instead.

http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/SSH

The web-based SVN viewers are at different URLs, as is anonymous access IIRC

There are some issues that remain unresolved for now:

http://titanpad.com/yyhfwA9Pyr

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise