sciapp / gr

GR framework: a graphics library for visualisation applications
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Ambiguous fonts license issue #190

Open kenhys opened 2 months ago

kenhys commented 2 months ago

Problem

Recently, I've packaged GR framework for Debian official archive. (I hope it can be available in Debian and derivative distributions easily)

During packaging efforts for Debian, I've noticed that there is ambiguous fonts license issue.

GR framework is licensed under MIT, but It seems that most of *.pfb contains Adobe's non-free codes which license is ambiguous.

Are they explicitly licensed fonts which contains fragments licensed under Apache 2.0 by Adobe?

You can confirm it by t1disasm *.pfb which is provided by t1utils.

t1disasm lib/gks/fonts/CenturySchL-Bold.pfb

Expected

Ambiguous font license issue is resolved.

Additional Information

See https://web.archive.org/web/20070403175721/http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_ps_code3.html about the fragment.

It says:

The PostScript language code shown below is copyrighted by Adobe Systems Incorporated, and may not be reproduced except by permission of Adobe Systems Incorporated.

It seems that in some situations, it was licensed under Apache 2.0 [1][2], but I'm not sure that it is true for lib/gks/fonts/*.pfb.

To avoid license issues and follow the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), I've dropped explicitly these fonts from gr-framework package in Debian archive.

[1] https://udd.debian.org/lintian-tag/license-problem-font-adobe-copyrighted-fragment-no-credit [2] https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/type1nondfsg