[Pkg-fonts-devel] New licensing of fontforge

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Vasudev Kamath (2016-03-27 12:36:44)
> I'm trying to package newer version of fontforge and I see this in
> LICENSE file first para.
> 
>> FontForge is available as a whole under the terms of the [GNU 
>> GPL](http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html), version 3 or any later 
>> version.  However, almost all of its parts are available under the 
>> "revised BSD license"
>> ([pdf](http://www.law.yi.org/~sfllaw/talks/bsd.pdf)) because 
>> FontForge was mostly written by George Williams, using that license.
>
> In my opinion the Licensing should dual licensed under GPL-v3 and
> Revised BSD. Do you guys see it other way?..

Dual-licensing commonly means "either or", not "and".

Also, when you "and" a permissive and strong copleft license, result 
is only the strong copyleft license (when they are compatible at all).

In short: Above license is simply "GPL-3+".


> As per Dave Crossland on this comment ¹ He explicitly says Debian has 
> to redistribute it under GPL-v3. So I would be happy to get teams 
> opinion here.

...but beware that you and Dave are talking about the _effective_ 
license of the project as a _whole_.

In debian/copyright you _can_ include such effective "computed" license 
- in the _header_ section when using machine-readable format 1.0.

You should (but arguably only that, not must) still cover licensing of 
each individual piece of upstream project - where it makes sense to 
document the pieces that may still be used under a more permissive 
license.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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