Are Adobe's new fonts violating free software?
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In the past few months, Adobe released Source Sans Pro and Source Code Pro for free under the free software compatible and copyleft SIL Open Font License 1.1 and are touting it as such. Source code is there and they encourage people to fork it, contribute back, and help improve it as part of a community.
The problem is while the fonts and the source code are under that free software license, they cannot be built with anything besides Adobe's proprietary font building tools. If Debian or Ubuntu were to include these fonts, they would have to fall into the contrib/non-free or multiverse repositories. Yikes.
I am basing this off of the http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=665334 and http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=683774 bug reports for Debian.
Is Adobe trying to give the perception that they are fully compliant to the license but only to a point where it benefits them? They think they are being all "hey man its open source!" by releasing the source code and hoping that you become dependent on Adobe's tools.
We already have fonts packaged that cannot be built by anyone else than
the original developers since they don't publish a source (while there
are papers documenting them as having a more useful source).
(I know several other examples of nonfree software by Adobe, I don't
know how important these Type 1 subroutines are.)
Michał Masłowski, Trisquel has fonts that cannot be built by anyone else than
the original developers since they don't publish a source?
That seems to go against the FSF's guidelines http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html as it appears to indicate that fonts in free GNU/Linux distributions must themselves also be free and have source available.
Quote:
"Information for practical use" includes software, documentation, fonts, and other data that has direct functional applications. It does not include artistic works that have an aesthetic (rather than functional) purpose, or statements of opinion or judgment.
All information for practical use in a free distribution must be available in source form. ("Source" means the form of the information that is preferred for making changes to it.)
The information, and the source, must be provided under an appropriate free license.
> Michał Masłowski, Trisquel has fonts that cannot be built by anyone
> else than
> the original developers since they don't publish a source?
>
> That seems to go against the FSF's guidelines
> http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html as
> it appears to indicate that fonts in free GNU/Linux distributions must
> themselves also be free and have source available.
Karl Berry considers it acceptable [0] since the font files themselves
can be edited (using e.g. FontForge). Font sources often aren't much
more useful than TTF or OTF "binaries". There is a similar situation
with TeX hyphenation dictionaries (they have patterns based on a list of
words which isn't published but would be useful e.g. for development of
other hyphenation algorithms) and bitmap images (although these often
aren't for practical purposes).
(I mentioned such fonts being included since usually it means them being
acceptable in free distros.)
> All information for practical use in a free distribution must be
> available in source form. ("Source" means the form of the information
> that is preferred for making changes to it.)
The problem is wording of "the form", many non-program works have
several forms that people with typical skills for making such works can
modify.
[0] http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2011-08/msg00008.html
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