[Fedora-legal-list] Legal issues with new font guidelines

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 2009-01-28 at 10:08:01 -0500, "Nicolas Mailhot"
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> If we start worrying about this we may as well refuse to package all
> the fonts that do not include full licensing information in their
> metadata, since nothing would stop the hypothetical third-party to
> re-distribute the font files without the detached license file anyway
> (regardless in which package we deploy it)

Apologies in advance, I read the original emails rather early this
morning, and my brain was not yet fully booted. :)
In addition, I had forgotten that each font package/subpackage in a
family requires the -common package, so in normal operation, there is no
way a font package installed would end up without the license also present.

As Nicolas points out, we're doing due diligence here to ensure that the
license is installed along with the font package in the normal, expected
method of installation. In addition, any Fedora spin will pull in the
appropriate -common package onto the distribution media (whether it is a
Live spin or not), so it is incredibly unlikely that someone would be
able to make a release with the licensing missing. In fact, the only way
they'd be able to accomplish this is by explicitly ignoring dependencies
or blocking the -common package (or installing with --nodocs), and all
of these could be construed as passing the responsibility for licensing
compliance from Fedora and on to the poor fool who decided to poke their
packaging structure with a sharp stick.

To sum it up: It is my opinion that it is not necessary to include the
font license in each font package/subpackage as long as it is present in
the -common package, and each of the font package/subpackages properly
Requires the -common package.

Roozbeh, thanks for pointing this out, and apologies for not thinking
this all the way through before replying initially.

~spot