Bug#851111: gargoyle-free: violates font license

[Sylvain]

Hi,

First, I just received a notification of this package being marked for
removal.  I never received any previous notification about this bug
while I'm subscribed to all BTS notifications.  Maybe this comes from
this weird second entry in the BTS about reassignment (meaning no
maintainers got it?) but this is a very bad surprise.


So what is this about:

> Source: gargoyle-free
> Version: 2011.1a-3.1
> Severity: serious

A mass bug filling, when the freeze is in effect.

This will take additional time for both the maintainer and the Debian
Release team.


> User: pkg-fonts-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org
> Usertags: license-violation
> X-Debbugs-CC: pkg-fonts-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org

No patch.


> Your source package contains an GPL/LGPL font:
> 
> fonts/LiberationMono-BoldItalic.ttf
> fonts/LiberationMono-Bold.ttf
> fonts/LiberationMono-Regular.ttf
> fonts/LiberationMono-Italic.ttf
> 
> This looks to be from here:
> 
> https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/
> 
> The font's source code appears to be here:
> 
> https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/liberation-fonts.git/tree/src
> 
> Your source package does not contain the font source code, therefore
> your distribution of the font constitutes a violation of the license.

Wait, Debian is distributing the source code of Liberation, on the
same servers as the source and binaries packages.

Doesn't this comply with the GPL already?
What threat are we trying to address?


> Please notify your upstream that they are violating the font license.

Unless they ship the source on the same server as their tarball.
(like a binary package with [L]GPL'd deps)


> Please remove the font from the source package and build-depend or
> depend on the fonts-liberation binary font package instead.
> 
> Please contact your upstream and ask them to use fontconfig or similar
> to get fonts for use by the software instead of using a specific font.

We already depend on the fonts-liberation package, and I got
fontconfig support integrated upstream years ago.

This sounds like an automated mail with little effort on the sending
side while expecting decent effert on the receiving side.


> This message is brought to you by the Debian Fonts Task Force:
> 
> http://wiki.debian.org/Fonts

I never heard of the Debian Fonts Task Force but just so you know, for
all these reasons this was quite a bad first impression :(


With regard to gargoyle-free in particular: the package is inactive
upstream so it's probably best to let the package die and reintroduce
it in Debian when they actually make a new release.

Cheers!
Sylvain