[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#625737: ITP: fonts-ricty -- High quality japanse fonts based on Inconsolata and Migu 1M

Hideki Yamane henrich at debian.or.jp
Sat May 7 12:29:07 UTC 2011


Hi,

On Fri, 06 May 2011 20:36:01 +0200
Nicolas Spalinger <nicolas_spalinger at sil.org> wrote:
> The project-specific and organisation-specific M+ license is really a
> BSD-like (BTW it is missing a translation for non-Japanese speakers in
> the source tree). 

 You can see M+License in English in LICENSE_E file, as
 http://mplus-fonts.sourceforge.jp/mplus-outline-fonts/index-en.html#license


> I don't know if this is intentional or not but the copyleft aspects of
> two of the three licensing models have been ignored here:
> this merge breaches section 5 of the OFL.
> And also breaches the IPA Font Licensing agreement article 3, 1. 3)

 I want to confirm, section 5 of the OFL has strong term "must not be
 distributed under any other license" - then, does merging OFL font with
 M+ also breach it?
 
 IPAFont license doesn't say such, it says "The Recipient must license 
 the Derived Program under the terms and conditions of this Agreement."
 I think IPA with M+ doesn't conflict with this term.


> (not that the IPA font license is particularly readable... but still).

 ;) 
 (I wonder why they didn't choose OFL. Maybe they want to promote
  their organization, but anyway) 


> Joining the team like Christian suggested sounds like a good way to help
> do that and take advantage of the collective skill of pkg-fonts.

 I asked Sasaki-san to send mail to this list if he has font package related 
 issue.  (Yes, "Given enough eyeballs...", four was not enough I thought)


> I would respectfully suggest contacting the authors of these fonts to
> get them to consider licensing compatibility issues and maybe sending
> their patches upstream for inclusion in the mainline of Inconsolata.
>
> Or maybe there are other sets of glyphs from another font that offers
> the same coverage and quality in a more compatible way for appropriate
> merging?

 Maybe we can take glyphs from M+ to Inconsolata, if
  - most of users would think it's better, and
  - merge OFL with M+ does not breach OFL section5 (or M+ author re-license 
    M+ font under same OFL).


> I freely admit that my knowledge of Japanese is sadly close to zero (I
> can barely write my own first name) but I'm confident Hideki-san or
> other Japanese speakers in our team can provide further help with these
> issues and upstream advocacy if they wish. Looking at all the work in
> our repository, Hideki-san surely has been quite successful (!)
> interacting with Japanese designers to get fonts released under licenses
> Debian users can safely use.

 Me? :) I just take some fonts from upstream, and asked two or three
 upstream authors/organizations to consider to change their license
 as DFSG-free one.
 

-- 
Regards,

 Hideki Yamane     henrich @ debian.or.jp/org
 http://wiki.debian.org/HidekiYamane



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