F20 System Wide Change: Web Assets

[Robert Marcano]

On 07/23/2013 12:56 PM, T.C. Hollingsworth wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 8:41 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
> <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
>> Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 17:07, Robert Marcano a écrit :
>>> Fonts has licenses, some of them require the license to be shown or the
>>> copyright displayed, some fonts has the copyright added to their
>>> metadata, I don't find for example that gnu-free-serif-fonts says on
>>> it's metadata that is GPL+3 with exceptions.
>
> On the contrary, /usr/share/fonts/gnu-free/FreeSerif.ttf does contain
> the usual "This is free software, you may distribute it under the GNU
> GPL..." block in the name table.
>
>> I'd say that when a font requires some communication of licensing
>> downstream, but forgets to put its own license in the font metadata,
>> that's an upstream problem. Upstream can not complain Fedora didn't work
>> hard enough about something it didn't do itself.
>
> Honestly, I'd prefer that we fixed this in Fedora.  It solves this
> problem quite nicely, and I don't really think it's that widespread an
> issue anyway.  (I'm going to run a script to check soon; I'm
> downloading 300MB worth of fonts right now.  ;-)

Fixing the font metadata is a good thing, but I still don't want a 
distribution that make a distributor of everything by default. If I 
install a web application package. I am accepting I will distribute what 
that applications needs and I will respect their license, not everything 
that is installed, This apply to the Javascript libraries too. If I 
install application that needs asset A, but I have installed asset B 
that is not needed by the applications, that doesn't means I want asset 
B to be distributed by default, that will means I should start 
blacklisting (that is wrong) or I need to uninstall the package and I am 
probably using the package for something local. We now have GNOME 
applications built using Javascript, so it is not rare we start using 
libraries that people think are only for the web and they aren't

>
> AFAICS it shouldn't be too hard to script up something so this would
> as easy as `fixfontmd --copyright "$(head -n3 LICENSE)" --licensedesc
> "$(cat LICENSE)" --licenseurl "http://example.com/LICENSE"` for
> packagers.
>
> I'd be happy to add a guideline for this and fix up existing packages
> if this seems amenable.
>
> -T.C.
>