On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 12:54:14PM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote: > * Theodore Ts'o ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > > You forgot one other thing. We'll also have to strip **ALL** > > **FONTS** from Debian, since fonts come in binary form, and we don't > > have anything approaching the "preferred form for modification" for > > fonts. In particular, the Truetype Bitstream Vera fonts which were so > > generously donated by Vera was generated not only using propietary > > source files, but also using propietary non-free programs. > > Well, now, I'm not entirely convinced of this. Could a similar argument > not be used on JPEG's or PNG's? Do we have *some* reasonable way to > modify these fonts? It's been a long time, but I did hack on some fonts > a long time ago and while it wasn't the most fun thing I could have > sworn there was a free program available to do it..
Ah, but I could hack around firmware using a hex editor as well. The question is whether or not a compressed PCF or truetype font file is the "preferred form for modification" --- i.e., source. If the requirement is that "source" is available for all files shipped in main, I don't see how we can include any of our fonts in the Debian distribution. - Ted P.S. For non-x86 kernels, the kernel includes fonts for console support. So despite removing the firmware from the kernel, at least for non-x86 kernels, we will probably need to move the kernel into non-free as well. Yay, rah.