[Pkg-fonts-devel] New licensing of fontforge

[Vasudev Kamath]

Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> writes:

> Quoting Vasudev Kamath (2016-03-27 12:36:44)
>> I'm trying to package newer version of fontforge and I see this in
>> LICENSE file first para.
>> 
>>> FontForge is available as a whole under the terms of the [GNU 
>>> GPL](http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html), version 3 or any later 
>>> version.  However, almost all of its parts are available under the 
>>> "revised BSD license"
>>> ([pdf](http://www.law.yi.org/~sfllaw/talks/bsd.pdf)) because 
>>> FontForge was mostly written by George Williams, using that license.
>>
>> In my opinion the Licensing should dual licensed under GPL-v3 and
>> Revised BSD. Do you guys see it other way?..
>
> Dual-licensing commonly means "either or", not "and".
>
> Also, when you "and" a permissive and strong copleft license, result 
> is only the strong copyleft license (when they are compatible at all).
>
> In short: Above license is simply "GPL-3+".

OK that clears my doubt.

>
>
>> As per Dave Crossland on this comment ¹ He explicitly says Debian has 
>> to redistribute it under GPL-v3. So I would be happy to get teams 
>> opinion here.
>
> ...but beware that you and Dave are talking about the _effective_ 
> license of the project as a _whole_.
>
> In debian/copyright you _can_ include such effective "computed" license 
> - in the _header_ section when using machine-readable format 1.0.

OK 
>
> You should (but arguably only that, not must) still cover licensing of 
> each individual piece of upstream project - where it makes sense to 
> document the pieces that may still be used under a more permissive 
> license.
>

as a whole it is GPL-3+ but individual files may have their own
licensing. Which should be covered in debian/copyright as needed.

Here is actual issue on github ¹ I forgot to add it in the first mail. 


¹ https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/2643