[tex-live] Re: non-free fonts

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 12 Oct 2002, Karl Berry wrote:

>     The debian people will likely tell you that this license isn't
>     free since the fonts can not be modified. 
> 
> Yes, exactly.  We don't need a lawyer to figure this one out :).

I believe the licensing terms were usually treated differently when
dealing with fonts. I remember RMS/FSF saying something like that about
fonts, that fonts can be treated like data, and not software, and that
sometimes redistributablity is enough (but I couldn't find it after
spending a little time with google).

But I just searched debian mailing lists archives and found that they have
removed Luxi fonts from debian's XFree86 4.2.0, after they had not
received any reply from B&H about a possibility to change the license. See:

	http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2002/debian-x-200208/msg00134.html
	http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2002/debian-x-200208/msg00135.html

With further investigation, I found that debian is also considering IBM
Courier (which is distributed with TeX Live) and Adobe Utopia (which is in
both teTeX and TeX Live) non-free:

	http://packages.debian.org/stable/x11/xfonts-scalable-nonfree.html

What do you think about these two? Should they be removed from TL and
teTeX, or should the licensing rules be relaxed a bit for fonts?

roozbeh