Me (Juliusz Chroboczek): JC> I think we need the DFSG to explicitly provide an exception for JC> fonts and artwork.
Branden Robinson: BR> I disagree. To do so would introduce far too much gray area, in my BR> opinion, and get Debian involved in even more licensing flamewars than we BR> currently have. [...] BR> Without getting too much into whys and wherefores, I'll note that BR> many of the arguments people use for a more lax interpretation of BR> "freeness" on things like fonts, music, and artwork are the same BR> ones that Daniel J. Bernstein uses to justify the non-free BR> license on most (all?) of the software he writes. As you can imagine, the inclusion of the Lucidux fonts into the XFree86 source tree didn't go without a fair amount of hesitation. We negociated the license with Charles Bigelow for a good six months (discussion was significantly hindered by the excruciatingly slow speed of the Earth's rotation -- Chuck is in California, I'm in Europe). At first, Chuck was thinking of allowing us to redistribute his fonts only if nobody was making a profit, clearly something we couldn't accept. We finally came to the conclusion that there is only one issue that was not negociable for Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes -- the issue of artistic integrity of the fonts. We did, of course, try to argue that people typically do not make gratuitious modifications to Free software, and that the Free software community has, with a few exceptions, been pretty good at filtering out broken versions of software. Chuck was not willing to risk it. We concluded that the main reason why we insist on the right to modify software is the need to maintain it. After carefully checking the technical, as opposed to artistic, quality of the Lucidux fonts (it is excellent, thanks to Y&Y), we agreed that there is no reason whatsoever why we should need to modify them in the foreseeable future, and decided to include these fonts in our tree. I believe that Chuck's attitude in the matter is typical of that of most font designers. Thus, I am firmly convinced that as Free Software becomes better known in the font design community, we will receive donations of more high-quality fonts, and that these are likely to come under terms similar to those of the B&H Lucidux licence. Thus, I would be very keen on seeing a carefully-written exception for fonts included in the DFSG. As you can see, the arguments above are of a purely pragmatic and technical nature (as typical of XFree86). I am not sufficiently familiar with the Debian project to understand whether you wish to be guided by considerations of this sort, or whether ideological considerations are more important. BR> Juliusz, I hope we can agree to disagree on this issue. We've been doing so for almost two years now, and thankfully both of us have managed to keep it on polite terms. It goes without saying that I defer to your opinion in all matters related to Debian packaging of X, even where I disagree with your opinions. Regards, Juliusz