[Pkg-fonts-devel] Ongoing discussion on the licensing of the Hack font

[Paride Legovini]

Hello,

Together with Fabian Greffrath I maintain the fonts-hack package.

The upstrem developer of the Hack font is considering to apply some
changes on the license of the font, in good part because of some issues
I raised regarding the Reserver Font Name clause of the license and the
distribution of the package in Debian.

The upcoming version 3.0 of the font will come with a full set of source
UFO file and a build script. What I would like to do is to have a Debian
source package that builds to the binary font package. Unfortunately the
RFN clause prevents this. Chris Simpkins, the upstream author,
understand the issue and is open to suggestions. He asked for advice in
the debian-legal mailing list [2] and opened a GitHub issue on the topic.

I gave a couple of suggestions there, but I'm sure that other people
here have way more experience than me on font licensing. I would be very
happy to hear other opinions.

Thank you,

Paride

[1] https://git.io/v7jLR
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2017/08/threads.html
[3] https://github.com/source-foundry/Hack/issues/271