[texhax] stix fonts license and TeX

[Michael Doob]

On Friday 09 September 2005 4:47 pm, Karl Berry wrote:
> There has been a massive font project (stixfonts.org) underway for years
> to produce a new comprehensive font set for mathematics.
> 
> Unfortunately their draft license
> (http://stixfonts.org/user_license.html) is definitely not free.  It
> forbids modification of the characters as designed, and places
> restrictions on what can be sold.  So, ironically enough, this project
> to "serve the scientific and engineering community" (among others) will
> not be able to be included in the free TeX distributions, such as teTeX,
> MiKTeX, and TeX Live, or the free operating system distributions, such
> as GNU/Linux -- all in widespread use among the scientific community.
> 

Karl --

Maybe you could explain the problems with a bit more detail. 

It seems that the license disallows modification of the fonts themselves 
(I recall that a few years ago Don Knuth got mad an installation that "improved"
his fonts). It would appear that additional glyphs could be included,
an "alt" version of the glyphs, if you like. 

It seems that the fonts themselves may not be sold unless they are part
of a  larger package. Is this a problem for free (as in beer) TeX distributions?

Cheers,
Michael


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Michael Doob                    Telephone: (204) 474-9796
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