Re: Should we expect Liberation fonts to be installed?
On 08/08/2010 06:56 AM, James McKenzie wrote:
Scott Ritchie wrote:
I was looking through our fairly large collection of open font bugs and realized that things might be a lot simpler if we took some opinionated positions and just declared certain fonts to be dependencies and expected all packagers to provide them.
This is similar to bundling our own Tahoma, except much less work.
This might work for Linux, but these fonts are not installed on any MacOSX version that I'm aware of. This might break Wine useage for Macs. It might also break it for Solaris as well.
James McKenzie
It should only break in a way that makes it as bad as it currently is. Thanks, Scott Ritchie
On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 8:58 PM, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
This might work for Linux, but these fonts are not installed on any MacOSX version that I'm aware of. This might break Wine useage for Macs. It might also break it for Solaris as well.
It should only break in a way that makes it as bad as it currently is.
Macs should already have the proper fonts installed, but it might take some config changes to use them properly. Seems more like a packaging issue. Along those lines, the hard drive space is cheap on this one. Seems like Wine packagers could just include the fonts and install them locally in c:\windows\fonts. More properly, we should probably try to detect a system installation of them since it'll probably exist and then fall back on installing them if it doesn't. Fonts are a pretty big usability issue, apps really don't behave properly without them. -Brian
On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 10:59 PM, Brian Vincent <brian.vincent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Along those lines, the hard drive space is cheap on this one. Seems like Wine packagers could just include the fonts and install them locally in c:\windows\fonts.
The Liberation fonts are GPL licensed, Wine is LGPL. -- -Austin
Along those lines, the hard drive space is cheap on this one. Seems like Wine packagers could just include the fonts and install them locally in c:\windows\fonts.
The Liberation fonts are GPL licensed, Wine is LGPL.
Is there a meaningful difference in the two licenses for fonts? LGPL is necessary for code, which gets loaded at runtime to a closed-source executable, but fonts contain no code, and thus aren't loaded. --Juan
On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Juan Lang <juan.lang(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Along those lines, the hard drive space is cheap on this one. Seems like Wine packagers could just include the fonts and install them locally in c:\windows\fonts.
The Liberation fonts are GPL licensed, Wine is LGPL.
Is there a meaningful difference in the two licenses for fonts? LGPL is necessary for code, which gets loaded at runtime to a closed-source executable, but fonts contain no code, and thus aren't loaded.
A good point, but I'm not qualified to answer that. I suspect that the SFC would be able to answer it, if it's a serious consideration. FWIW, a couple links: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Fonts and the actual license: http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=liberation-fonts.git;a=blob_plain;f=sourc... -- -Austin
Is there a meaningful difference in the two licenses for fonts? LGPL is necessary for code, which gets loaded at runtime to a closed-source executable, but fonts contain no code, and thus aren't loaded.
A good point, but I'm not qualified to answer that. I suspect that the SFC would be able to answer it, if it's a serious consideration.
FWIW, a couple links: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Fonts
and the actual license: http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=liberation-fonts.git;a=blob_plain;f=sourc...
The actual license contains the font exception. IANAL, but that would appear to resolve any transitive license problem that might otherwise arise from including Liberation fonts. --Juan
participants (4)
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Austin English -
Brian Vincent -
Juan Lang -
Scott Ritchie