Re: Fonts (Was: CVS commit: xsrc/external/mit)

[Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

Sorry for late reply, I managed to miss this mail.

On Sun, May 15, 2022 at 09:00:34 +0000, nia wrote:

> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 01:07:03AM +0300, Valery Ushakov wrote:
> > http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/ seems to be a decent option for
> > a bitmap font.  It's under SIL OFL, has good script coverage, a range
> > of sizes and bold variant.  It's the 9front's default font.
> 
> I'm not sure SIL OFL is as good as a think as you suggest it is.

I'm not sure what you think I suggest here.  To the best of my
knowledge I was not suggesting anything :), just stating a fact that
it's under a license that even Debian and FSF seems to be happy about.
But IANAL.


> It's quite a restrictive license compared to our normal fare,
> and it operates under the assumption that fonts are softare.
> This is a neat legal trick invented by lawyers for TrueType
> and scalable fonts, which use formats that are arguably turing
> complete, but aren't programmed using anything close to a
> conventional programming tool.
> 
> For bitmap fonts like Terminus, the case is much looser,
> and I doubt many courts would accept that pictures of letters
> are possible to license as software to avoid prior legal
> understanding that designs of individual letters may not be
> copyrighted.

Please, can you outline what the practical consequences would be for
NetBSD in your opinion?  How redistributing an OFL licensed font with
NetBSD is going to impact (negatively, as you seem to imply) the
project, the users, people that make products derived from NetBSD,
etc?  This is not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious.

ofl-v1.0 and ofl-v1.1 are in pkgsrc's DEFAULT_ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES, we
include fonts/terminus-font package into binary packages (though we
don't build the re-encoded subsets for some reason, may be everyone
*did* move onto unicode these days...)

-uwe