Hi,
I'm afraid these answers are utterly unconvincing. I've just checked Debian made the very same analysis as us, and you're on your way to get yourself blacklisted in all major Linux distributions.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/texlive-extra/+bug/135911/comments...
In case that's not clear enough, you have a problem.
On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 12:48 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
Jonathan Underwood wrote:
Dear Hans,
Some legal concerns have arisen regarding the licensing of the TeX Gyre fonts - please see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=456580. In particular, this part is most relevant:
- The textlive-texfm includes tex-gyre fonts. As the authors freely
admit they lifted the GNU Ghostscript GPL fonts, changed their format, modified the result, and relicensed it all under their own license [1]. They don't list any authorization for this from the previous rights holders in their package. Since we can not ship the GPL bits they lifted under another license, and we can not ship the bits they added under the GPL without tex-gyre people authorization, the whole thing is un-distributable and must be removed [2]
[1] page 8 of http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/afp05.pdf [2] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-fonts-list/2008-July/msg00111.html
I wonder if you would take a few moments to look at this and comment on the correctness of the analysis and help to resolve these issues? I am sure you'd agree with me that resolving this is important for the TeX Gyre project, and free software fonts in general.
Finally, in case it's not clear, I'd just like to point out that I am *not* contacting you in my capacity as chair of the UKTUG funding sub-committee in this instance, but as a member of UKTUG, and also a Fedora contributor. Nonetheless, as a UKTUG member I would not be happy to think that UKTUG is financially supporting a project which is in violation of the GPL, if that is indeed the case.
a short reply (i have to catch up many mails after the tug conference)
- the gust font licence is mostly the lppl licence which is accepted as ok
Irrelevant. We are not complaining about the Gust font license we are complaining about re-licensing without previuous authors authorization.
- the main 'additions' concern packaging (file names, internal font
names, etc. since any simple replacement/extension can mess up doc production and could put a stress on user group support), which is an important issue for tex distributions
That's still a lot of work. We respect licensing regardless of the size of the contribution
- gpl is targeted at programs and fonts are not exactly programs
Given the number of fonts we ship under GPL, LGPL or derived licenses (including Liberation), this argument is not receivable. "I don't like this license I'll just use another and no one's the wiser" — you're not serious.
- we try to contact e.g. urw on some other issues (it's currently not
even clear of some of the fonts were ever legally gpl'd!) but they don't react (such a kind of 'disappearing responsibility' happened before with some other font where eventually responsibility was transfered to tug)
You can not work just with URW. The right contacts are Artifex and all the people who contributed to the fonts since their release.
- some of the 'original' fonts contain additions of rather poor quality
(greek and cyrillic) and when/how they ended up in there withoput any quality assurance is unclear, so in general one can say that these fonts have a somewhat fuzzy history
Quality as nothing to do with licensing. You can make bad contributions under a good license, and good contributions under a bad license. We can ship the first but not the other.
we're currently convinced that eveything is ok with respect to the licence (btw, the amount of changes to the fonts are pretty large so one might as well wonder if we're dealing with new digitizations)
Again, this is the kind of fuzzy logic that can not stand legaly.
Jerzy might have a more detailed answer since he's in charge of the licencing
It looks to me like the GUST fokes did their best, but they're not a big company, so they ignored some legal aspects. Rather than telling them they're about to get blacklisted, perhaps a more constructive approach is in order. Below are the copyright messages included with (i) Nimubus No.9 Regular 1.06 in Type 1 format, as shipped by Fedora 9, and (ii) TeX Gyre Termes Regular 1.011, which is derived from Nimbus, also currently shipped by Fedora:
<Nimbus copyright> Copyright \050URW\051++,Copyright 1999 by \050URW\051++ Design & Development; Cyrillic glyphs added by Valek Filippov \050C\051 2001-2005 </Nimbus copyright>
<Termes copyright> Copyright (URW)++, copyright 1999 by (URW)++ Design & Development; Cyrillic glyphs added by Valek Filippov, copyright 2001-2002; Vietnamese characters were added by Han The Thanh; copyright 2006, 2008 for TeX Gyre extensions by B. Jackowski and J.M. Nowacki (on behalf of TeX users groups). This work is released under the GUST Font License -- see http://tug.org/fonts/licenses/GUST-FONT-LICENSE.txt for details. </Termes copyright>
As you can see, there is no attempt to missattribute the work. The only trouble is that GUST attempted to relicense the work under more liberal terms, from GPL to LPPL/GUST. IMHO, the way is to convince URW and the two individual contributors (Valek Filippov and Han The Thanh) to agree to relicense their work under a license more appropriate for fonts. Perhaps Tom can suggest what the best license is.
It seem that GUST had trouble hearing back from URW. Perhaps some company with more legal clout should offer some help. After all, URW cannot financially benefit from GPL'd fonts that have been hacked by the FOSS community for a decade, so my guess is that URW saw this relicensing matter as just not worth their time. Also, when URW released the fonts, people weren't aware as they are today of the legal implications of GPL for fonts...
Hope this helps, Vasile
2008/7/26 Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net:
Hi,
I'm afraid these answers are utterly unconvincing. I've just checked Debian made the very same analysis as us, and you're on your way to get yourself blacklisted in all major Linux distributions.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/texlive-extra/+bug/135911/comments...
In case that's not clear enough, you have a problem.
On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 12:48 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
Jonathan Underwood wrote:
Dear Hans,
Some legal concerns have arisen regarding the licensing of the TeX Gyre fonts - please see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=456580. In particular, this part is most relevant:
- The textlive-texfm includes tex-gyre fonts. As the authors freely
admit they lifted the GNU Ghostscript GPL fonts, changed their format, modified the result, and relicensed it all under their own license [1]. They don't list any authorization for this from the previous rights holders in their package. Since we can not ship the GPL bits they lifted under another license, and we can not ship the bits they added under the GPL without tex-gyre people authorization, the whole thing is un-distributable and must be removed [2]
[1] page 8 of http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/afp05.pdf [2] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-fonts-list/2008-July/msg00111.html
I wonder if you would take a few moments to look at this and comment on the correctness of the analysis and help to resolve these issues? I am sure you'd agree with me that resolving this is important for the TeX Gyre project, and free software fonts in general.
Finally, in case it's not clear, I'd just like to point out that I am *not* contacting you in my capacity as chair of the UKTUG funding sub-committee in this instance, but as a member of UKTUG, and also a Fedora contributor. Nonetheless, as a UKTUG member I would not be happy to think that UKTUG is financially supporting a project which is in violation of the GPL, if that is indeed the case.
a short reply (i have to catch up many mails after the tug conference)
- the gust font licence is mostly the lppl licence which is accepted as ok
Irrelevant. We are not complaining about the Gust font license we are complaining about re-licensing without previuous authors authorization.
- the main 'additions' concern packaging (file names, internal font
names, etc. since any simple replacement/extension can mess up doc production and could put a stress on user group support), which is an important issue for tex distributions
That's still a lot of work. We respect licensing regardless of the size of the contribution
- gpl is targeted at programs and fonts are not exactly programs
Given the number of fonts we ship under GPL, LGPL or derived licenses (including Liberation), this argument is not receivable. "I don't like this license I'll just use another and no one's the wiser" — you're not serious.
- we try to contact e.g. urw on some other issues (it's currently not
even clear of some of the fonts were ever legally gpl'd!) but they don't react (such a kind of 'disappearing responsibility' happened before with some other font where eventually responsibility was transfered to tug)
You can not work just with URW. The right contacts are Artifex and all the people who contributed to the fonts since their release.
- some of the 'original' fonts contain additions of rather poor quality
(greek and cyrillic) and when/how they ended up in there withoput any quality assurance is unclear, so in general one can say that these fonts have a somewhat fuzzy history
Quality as nothing to do with licensing. You can make bad contributions under a good license, and good contributions under a bad license. We can ship the first but not the other.
we're currently convinced that eveything is ok with respect to the licence (btw, the amount of changes to the fonts are pretty large so one might as well wonder if we're dealing with new digitizations)
Again, this is the kind of fuzzy logic that can not stand legaly.
Jerzy might have a more detailed answer since he's in charge of the licencing
-- Nicolas Mailhot
Fedora-fonts-list mailing list Fedora-fonts-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-fonts-list
On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 12:59 +0300, Vasile Gaburici wrote:
As you can see, there is no attempt to missattribute the work. The only trouble is that GUST attempted to relicense the work under more liberal terms, from GPL to LPPL/GUST. IMHO, the way is to convince URW and the two individual contributors (Valek Filippov and Han The Thanh) to agree to relicense their work under a license more appropriate for fonts. Perhaps Tom can suggest what the best license is.
I won't go so far as to suggest the "best license", however, the simplest solution would be to convince the contributors to agree to license their contributions under the GPL (with font exception) as that would be compatible with URW's original work (thus, we would not be bottlenecked trying to reach URW).
~spot
2008/7/30 Tom spot Callaway tcallawa@redhat.com:
I won't go so far as to suggest the "best license", however, the simplest solution would be to convince the contributors to agree to license their contributions under the GPL (with font exception) as that would be compatible with URW's original work (thus, we would not be bottlenecked trying to reach URW).
URW's GPL release does not include the "font exception" additional permission; indeed, it predates it.
On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 19:13 +0100, Dave Crossland wrote:
URW's GPL release does not include the "font exception" additional permission; indeed, it predates it.
Yes, however, GPL is not incompatible with "GPL with font exception". It doesn't make sense to continue using GPL without the font exception for font licensing, which is why I recommended that instead of simply GPL.
~spot
My lack of legal brain is confused on this. If URW doesn't change the license and it remains purely GPL, but the other contributors agree to re-license their parts as GLP+FontException, then what is there to be gained by this? Isn't the user bound by most restrictive license in the package, that is pure GPL?
On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 9:19 PM, Tom spot Callaway tcallawa@redhat.com wrote:
On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 19:13 +0100, Dave Crossland wrote:
URW's GPL release does not include the "font exception" additional permission; indeed, it predates it.
Yes, however, GPL is not incompatible with "GPL with font exception". It doesn't make sense to continue using GPL without the font exception for font licensing, which is why I recommended that instead of simply GPL.
~spot
2008/7/30 Vasile Gaburici vgaburici@gmail.com:
My lack of legal brain is confused on this. If URW doesn't change the license and it remains purely GPL, but the other contributors agree to re-license their parts as GLP+FontException, then what is there to be gained by this? Isn't the user bound by most restrictive license in the package, that is pure GPL?
That is my understanding, and my point :-)
On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 22:22 +0100, Dave Crossland wrote:
2008/7/30 Vasile Gaburici vgaburici@gmail.com:
My lack of legal brain is confused on this. If URW doesn't change the license and it remains purely GPL, but the other contributors agree to re-license their parts as GLP+FontException, then what is there to be gained by this? Isn't the user bound by most restrictive license in the package, that is pure GPL?
That is my understanding, and my point :-)
Yes, that is true, but:
A) The package is then distributable B) The only remaining issue is to sell URW on the font exception, which can be done at any time.
~spot
2008/7/30 Tom spot Callaway tcallawa@redhat.com:
2008/7/30 Vasile Gaburici vgaburici@gmail.com:
Isn't the user bound by most restrictive license in the package, that is pure GPL?
Yes, that is true, but:
A) The package is then distributable B) The only remaining issue is to sell URW on the font exception, which can be done at any time.
Ah yes okay, now I get it, when you said
"thus, we would not be bottlenecked trying to reach URW"
you didn't mean we don't have to contact URW to arrive at our destination - we still do - just we aren't bottlenecked from distributing the Gyre fonts.
Perhaps the Gyre project could release all the glyphs that are not derived from the original GPL ones as a separate font package with the GUST license?
Most of Gyre's additions are not glyhs but OpenType tables: kerning, locale specific typographic rules (locl etc.)
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 1:07 AM, Dave Crossland dave@lab6.com wrote:
2008/7/30 Tom spot Callaway tcallawa@redhat.com:
2008/7/30 Vasile Gaburici vgaburici@gmail.com:
Isn't the user bound by most restrictive license in the package, that is pure GPL?
Yes, that is true, but:
A) The package is then distributable B) The only remaining issue is to sell URW on the font exception, which can be done at any time.
Ah yes okay, now I get it, when you said
"thus, we would not be bottlenecked trying to reach URW"
you didn't mean we don't have to contact URW to arrive at our destination - we still do - just we aren't bottlenecked from distributing the Gyre fonts.
Perhaps the Gyre project could release all the glyphs that are not derived from the original GPL ones as a separate font package with the GUST license?
On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 12:59 +0300, Vasile Gaburici wrote:
It looks to me like the GUST fokes did their best, but they're not a big company, so they ignored some legal aspects. Rather than telling them they're about to get blacklisted, perhaps a more constructive approach is in order.
When in doubt, ask questions first and relicense later. The correct solution always was just to keep the original license and only change it if every entity that contributed to the work approved.
So what if the GUST people do not like the original licence — many fonts have a sucky license (Bistream Vera, Liberation…), and people still abide with the original licensing.
(And for the record, I doubt anyone but the GUST people find their license pretty. Legalese referensing other legalese, come on, it's not a perl obfuscation contest)
Nicolas Mailhot
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Dave Crossland -
Nicolas Mailhot -
Tom Callaway -
Vasile Gaburici