Hi.
I was dutifully converting my font packages to the new guidelines, when I ran into a possible legal issue.
For the sake of argument, let us assume a font licensed under OFL, called Mardana. The upstream tarball has two families inside, Mardana Sans and Mardana Serif, in TTF format. The text of the OFL license is not included in the TTFs themselves, but in a separate text file in the tarball. Actually, let's assume the TTFs themselves don't have any copyright or licensing metadata.
According to the new font packaging guidelines, there would be three packages, mardana-fonts-common, mardana-serif-fonts, and mardana-sans-fonts. All documentation related files will be in *-common, and all the actual TTFs would be in *-sans-* and *-serif-*.
So, someone finds about the fonts, wants to use them on Windows, searches for them, and finds our binary RPM for Mardana Sans, and downloads it. She then opens it with some tool and installs it on her machine.
But that's a license violation by us:
"2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled, redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user."
But we are not providing any copyright notice or license in our binary RPM, that is supposedly the "software" that that Font Software is bundled with. All we say, is two pointers: "OFL" in the RPM license tag, and "mardana-fonts-common" in the requires tag.
Of course, if the user really wants to, she can investigate the binary RPM, and find pointers to the actual license, and go and find the license. But we would not be redistributing the license with "each copy".
Please enlighten me.
Roozbeh
On 2009-01-28 at 1:05:01 -0500, Roozbeh Pournader roozbeh@gmail.com wrote:
Of course, if the user really wants to, she can investigate the binary RPM, and find pointers to the actual license, and go and find the license. But we would not be redistributing the license with "each copy".
Please enlighten me.
IMHO, in such a scenario, it is acceptable to put a copy of the license in each binary RPM. This will not cause conflicts, because it is the same file in the same location. If this obsoletes the need for a -common package, then do not create one.
However, the license may be embedded inside the font itself. Might be worth poking it with FontForge to see. If it is, then this is not necessary.
~spot
Le Mer 28 janvier 2009 07:05, Roozbeh Pournader a écrit :
So, someone finds about the fonts, wants to use them on Windows, searches for them, and finds our binary RPM for Mardana Sans, and downloads it. She then opens it with some tool and installs it on her machine.
I don't think anyone can sue us because someone extracted stuff from an rpm and installed it without using rpm itself when all our own uses pass through rpm. I'd rate this risk at 1 on a scale of 100, when us distributing misappropriated font content included in a font file that we didn't detect in time would be 90.
And in fact our current problem is more to get upstreams to write correct, complete and accurate legal documentation than upstreams complaining we do not propagate this documentation properly.
But IANAL, and if there is a legal need, there is no technical limitation that would prevent duplicating the same files in all the subpackages of the same srpmmany times over.
Le Mer 28 janvier 2009 14:18, Tom "spot" Callaway a écrit :
If this obsoletes the need for a -common package, then do not create one.
However if you don't you'll have to deal with the directory ownership of the common font directory (I purposefully didn't want to open this particular can of worm) and other common files.
Also documentation can be bulky, especially when upstream provides in in pdf or .doc form with embedded bitmaps of what the font looks like.
On Wednesday 28 January 2009 06:05:01 Roozbeh Pournader wrote: ...
For the sake of argument, let us assume a font licensed under OFL, called Mardana. The upstream tarball has two families inside, Mardana Sans and Mardana Serif, in TTF format. The text of the OFL license is not included in the TTFs themselves, but in a separate text file in the tarball. Actually, let's assume the TTFs themselves don't have any copyright or licensing metadata.
...
Of course, if the user really wants to, she can investigate the binary RPM, and find pointers to the actual license, and go and find the license. But we would not be redistributing the license with "each copy".
Put the license text file (I'm assuming it's not all that big) as %doc for each subpackage; it should end up in a separate directory under /usr/share/doc, thus eliminating any worry about file conflicts should someone update the license at any point and a user upgrade one font subpackage but not the other.
Le Mer 28 janvier 2009 15:00, Bill Crawford a écrit :
Put the license text file (I'm assuming it's not all that big)
This is not a safe asumption
as %doc for each subpackage; it should end up in a separate directory under /usr/share/doc, thus eliminating any worry about file conflicts should someone update the license at any point and a user upgrade one font subpackage but not the other.
This is not a problem, the template forces each subpackage to depend on the exact version of the common subpackage, so all the subpackages installed on a system will always be updated in lockstep.
On 2009-01-28 at 8:41:39 -0500, "Nicolas Mailhot" nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net wrote:
However if you don't you'll have to deal with the directory ownership of the common font directory (I purposefully didn't want to open this particular can of worm) and other common files.
Also documentation can be bulky, especially when upstream provides in in pdf or .doc form with embedded bitmaps of what the font looks like.
Well, it seems like there wouldn't be much of a case to obsolete -common in that scenario, just move the license into each subpackage.
~spo
-
Bill Crawford -
Nicolas Mailhot -
Roozbeh Pournader -
Tom Callaway