[Pkg-fonts-devel] Talking with an upstream about changing his license

[Rogério Brito]

Dear people,

I am glad to now become part of the pkg-fonts team and I have already
checked out the whole subversion repository to ease collaboration
(actually, I'm now converting it, with the help of git svn, to a git
repository, so that I can work offline---and I will be on vacations
this next week).

Anyway, one the fonts part of things, I am interested in packaging an
old-style font (similar to Bembo) and I found one that is still under
development, but that doesn't have a free license.

Here is a snippet of a private conversation with upstream:

> I'm glad you find XXXXXXX appealing and worthy of inclusion in Debian.  You
> ask about modifying the license.  I'm assuming that the license for anything
> included in such a distribution would authorize anyone to do anything they
> wanted with the software (modify it, etc.).  Is there any prohibition aginst
> redistributing it, particularly for commercial purposes?

It may not be apparent from this brief passage, but I get the feeling
that upstream is not exactly opposed to releasing his nice work as
Free Software.

Of course, having it package in non-free is better than not having it
and, if we had it packaged and distributed there, I think that that
would be a good starting point so that he would see his opus used and
have a personal satisfaction with his work of love and that could mean
that he would see the benefits of releasing his work as Free Software
in a latter release.

With that said, what would be a recommended course of action here?


Thanks, Rogério Brito.

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