[Bug 456580] Multiple severe problems with texlive-texfm-fonts

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Summary: Multiple severe problems with texlive-texfm-fonts


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=456580


nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |ajax at redhat.com,
                   |                            |besfahbo at redhat.com,
                   |                            |twaugh at redhat.com,
                   |                            |tcallawa at redhat.com, fedora-
                   |                            |fonts-bugs-list at redhat.com
OtherBugsDependingO|                            |182235, 438943
              nThis|                            |
           Severity|low                         |high
           Priority|low                         |high




------- Additional Comments From nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net  2008-07-24 16:32 EST -------
1. The textlive-texfm lists Utopia among its licenses. That probably means it
includes Adobe Utopia or its derivatives. The Adobe Utopia font design is
patented by Adobe and Fedora legal has not decided if Utopia and its derivatives
were safe enough to be allowed in the repository yet (see bug #452317). In the
meanwhile we should not ship any of those fonts in Fedora.

2. The textlive-texfm includes tex-gyre fonts. As the authors freely admit they
lifted the GNU Ghostscript GPL fonts, changed their format, modified the result,
and relicensed it all under their own license [1]. They don't list any
authorization for this from the previous rights holders in their package.
Since we can not ship the GPL bits they lifted under another license, and we can
not ship the bits they added under the GPL without tex-gyre people
authorization, the whole thing is un-distributable and must be removed [2]

[1] page 8 of http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/afp05.pdf
[2] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-fonts-list/2008-July/msg00111.html

In addition:

A. This package is a legal nightmare and mixes material from many different
origins and licensing (making any audit difficult, even though we *know* fonts
are a legal minefield)

B. This package is a livecd and bandwidth nightmare (monolithic dump of 56 MiBs
of data !!!)

C. This package wastes huge amounts of space by shipping the same fonts in many
different formats, even though only one would be enough

D. This package ships bulky forks of material already present in other distro
packages (ghostscript font data), and no effort is made to consolidate them.
Even though TEX users are not the only ones interested in ghostscript font
fixes, and the PS1 format used by ghostscript fonts is probably the main
remaining reason why the xorg package maintainers can not drop type1 support in X.

E. This package ships resources that would be highly useful to most of our users
(truetype and opentype fonts), but hides them in a tex-specific directory not
exposed by system font libs. (some of them are even in our wishlists)

For all those reasons:

a. Please drop the Utopia fonts from the package immediately

b. Please drop the Tex-gyre fonts from the package immediately

c. Please notify the Tex-gyre authors on the behalf of Fedora so they fix their
licensing

d. Once this is done please package the Tex-Gyre fonts in a separate package
(using the tex-gyre upstream releases, not the texlive repackaging). Since the
TEX-Gyre font preferred modification format is metatype (as documented in their
presentation) that means a package that build OpenType CFF fonts (OTF) from
metatype sources (to respect the GPL)

e. please use the distribution official font template for this package. When
fonts are usable system wide they should be packaged as system font, and tex
packages modified to use the system version.

f. please add to this package fontconfig rules that declare the tex-gyre fonts
valid substitutes to the adobe and ghostscript fonts

g. please have this package subpackaged in a subpackage per font family (or
create a separate package per font family)

h. please work with the Ghostscript packager so Ghostscript is switched use
those packages, so the old PS1 fonts can be retired (making ajax happy)

i. Please work with the Ghostscript packager so Ghostscript and Tex-Gyre
licensing is switched to GPL+font exception (so the fonts can be safely embedded
in pdfs)

j. please do the same repackaging for every truetype and opentype font in the
package, so their licensing can be individually checked, they get installed
system-wide (benefiting non-tex users), and the monster package is broken up in
granular livecd-olpc-bandwidth friendly packages. Each time do use the distro
font packaging guidelines (including the build-from-source bit), and do start
from the font real upstreams (not the texlive/CTAN middlemen)
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException

e. You can keep other fonts in legacy format in your package. But frankly if I
were you I'd drop them. Each one needs legal crosschecking and if no one cared
enough to convert them to a modern OTF/TTF format they're probably not that
useful. Either way that part of the package should be user-optional at least

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