liberation-fonts 1.04 released.

[Caius Chance]

Hi Dave,

Thank you very much for your email. I do appreciate your concern on this font set.

IMHO, section 1b requires hardware manufacturer to provide source of these fonts (or modified edition) that they included in their hardware products, as well as to provide the owner of those hardware products to modify and reinstall the reinstalled copy. This is actually an extra protection to consumers when some hardware manufacturers might utilize open sources software (in this case, fonts) but trying to stay away from trouble by stating that any hacking activities on their products will void the warranty. Personally, despite of differences from original text of GPL, this exception is an enhancement instead of regression to human society.

As my personal understanding, Red Hat is the intelligent property owner of Liberation Fonts (Ascender is original manufacturer FYI). It should not be recognized as breakage of GPL clauses because RH is the initial party who release the fonts from commercial to "open source/free" for the public. It is more appropriate to define the license as "a GPL based license with customized modification for better user/developer protections on font-form software" rather than a broken GPL. Yes, personally I would say this is not a GPL, nor a broken GPL, but more like a new license. Hence, it is highly recommended for anyone who is going to utilize Liberation Fonts thoughtfully analysis all contents on both COPYING and License.txt in advance, just like read a brand new license. 

Hope this info helps. BTW, Debian package maintainers have approved Liberation Fonts as valid for inclusion in version 1.04.beta2 already.

Wish you enjoyable developing.

Best Regards,
Caius.

----- "Dave Crossland" <dave at lab6.com>さんが書いたメッセージ：

> 2008/7/13 Caius Chance <cchance at redhat.com>:
> >
> > liberation-fonts version 1.04 has been released:
> 
> Section 1b of the license.txt remains; this suggests that the fonts
> are unredistributable under GPL Section 7's "liberty or death" clause
> :-(
> 
> Dave


-- 
Caius Carlos Chance < cchance AT redhat DOT com >
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