[Pkg-fonts-devel] About the licensing of URW Garamond No. 8

[Rogério Brito]

Dear people,

Below is a draft of a letter that I intend to send to (URW)++ to try
to get them to release the URW Garamond No. 8 fonts in a license that
is free according to the DFSG.

This move was suggested to me by Khaled Hosny, a member of the Arabic
TeX community.

I am open to comments and criticism regarding the letter below so that
it can be properly received by the responsible (URW)++ department to
let them know about the interest in these legal issues.


Thanks in advance for your comments,
Rogério.

P.S.: Please, as I am not a native speaker of English, feel free to
correct my grammar, style or anything that would improve the text.

----------------------------------------

Dear sirs from (URW)++:

Interested in having texts typeset in TeX with your Garamond No. 8
typeface, I started reading the license of the fonts, which are now,
under the AFPL. This license does not fully qualify as Free Software,
a fact that is explicitly stated in the preamble of that text.

Since the fonts have already generated enough interest, people used
them in small projects and, sometimes, even redistribute them in
networks like CTAN (but not enabled by default).

Due to such interest, some efforts, like Gaël Varoquaux's
modifications to URW Garamond No.8 surfaced.

Motivated by his changes, the necessity of a wider availability of
symbols and the technologies that make it possible to use OpenType
fonts with TeX, I created a public repository to complete the fonts
and integrate some work by others.

Khaled Hosny, from the Egyptian Group of Users, has kindly joined me,
provided valuable comments and technical expertise to give force to
the project. As the project starts to diverge from the original fonts
released by (URW)++, it would be convenient if the fonts could be made
available under a Free Software license, as that would attract
contribution to this derivative work of yours.

If, indeed, you allow the redistribution of the fonts under a Free
License, we can, of course, make the fonts available under a different
name, fully acknowledge that the initial work was made by (URW)++,
refer people to your commercial fonts, make it clear that the project
has only been based on your initial release, but that does not reflect
the designs of (URW)++.

Much work will have to be done and I am sure that it will soon have a
different artistic style from the glyphs of your offerings.

For reference, the public repository is at
    http://git.debian.org/?p=users/rbrito-guest/urw-garamond.git
with a mirror at
    http://github.com/rbrito/urw-garamond

I am available to clarify any aspects of this request.


Looking forward for your feedback,

Rogério Theodoro de Brito
Debian Project Maintainer, Member of the Fonts Packaging Team
Instructor of Computer Science, Univ. Mackenzie, São Paulo, Brazil

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
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