On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 02:14:14PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > [...] > Fonts may have a preferred source form that is not textual but binary. > For another example of that, see etoys which is in non-free despite > being DFSG-free: It is kept out of main due to concerns that its source > format might be too alien for the Debian security team to reasonably do > audits on the codebase. > > But from a legal standpoint, code either have freely licensed *source* > or they don't. And that applies to fonts in the sense that either the > font *is* its own source or it isn't. > [...]
Dear all, I've been mulling over this, and have had a thought. I am not a font designer, but extrapolating from what Rob has been saying, I think it is a reasonable presumption that most fonts are not designed in FontForge or similar open source software. And that is surely the case for a significant proportion of the fonts distributed in Debian; we certainly don't get the "source code" for them (which, in the case of FontForge, would be an SFD file). I looked at the Debian source for a random font on my system, and all it contains is the ttf files and the OFL license text. Looking at the upstream webpage, the references there include guidance on how to use FontLab. So presumably the ttf format is not the preferred upstream format for this particular font. If we go down the route of excluding FontAwesome, it would also be incumbent upon us to do an audit of all the fonts shipped by Debian, and we would probably end up with almost no fonts at all, or have to move them all to non-free. Best wishes, Julian
