[Fedora-legal-list] Ekushey Bengali fonts

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 10:27 AM, "Sankarshan (সঙ্কর্ষণ)"
<sankarshan.mukhopadhyay at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>
>> Paul W. Frields wrote:
>>>
>>> https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/648
>>> I'm not sure who (if anyone) has been alerted about this request for us
>>> to host some Bengali fonts which apparently have some uncertain origins,
>>> despite their licensing.  (See ticket URL above for details.)  This
>>> situation's probably not critical, because there's nothing being hosted
>>> by Fedora yet AFAICT, but it would be nice to respond to the
>>> requestor(s) in the ticket.
>>
>> CC'ing a couple of folks who can check this out.
>
> The fonts in question have had unclear origins particularly related to the
> glyphs. This issue has been out there for a while without a very clear
> statement from the developers.
>
> Sayamindu (cc: ed) has some more knowledge about the lack of clarity of
> these set of fonts.
>
> On a personal note, I would not like to see them hosted at Fedora
> Infrastructure or included as part of anything related to bn_IN (which is
> maintained by Runa) till there is clarity on the issue.
>
> ~sankarshan

Hello,
I put up some information in https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ekushey_fonts

I also had the experience of working with some of the people involved
with the project, and I would highly discourage anyone from
distributing those fonts. One of the people behind the project had
donated some glyphs for conversion into a Free/Open Source OpenType
font, claiming that those were his own design. Some months later, we
found that they were lifted from the font used by a pretty popular
Bengali specific word processor from Bangladesh. When we pointed this
out to the "donor" he kept on claiming that the work was his own (even
after we had demonstrated that the glyphs match exactly if
superimposed).

Thanks,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
One Laptop Per Child Project
http://laptop.org