[Xprint] font metric file licensing issues (was: PMF license)

[Branden Robinson]

[Hamish, there is some material that may be of interest to you about 35
lines down.]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 03:47:41PM +1000, Drew Parsons wrote:
> Someone raised the question of whether Xprint font files need to be
> removed, probably in 2002 as Roland said. I asked Roland about it and he
> replied they were under the same X11 licence as the other files. I
> accepted this and didn't pursue the question further.
> I can't find the discussion archived, it may have been a private
> correspondence with Roland.  The guts of the argument were the same that
> Roland is presenting here.  I hope his reply to you on Saturday has
> convinced you.

I'm sorry it has taken me a while to get back to this.

On Sat, Oct 09, 2004 at 09:33:58AM +0200, Roland Mainz wrote:
> Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Your reasoning seems to be grounded on a couple of problematic premises:
> > * That font metric information isn't copyrightable.  This may be true in
> >   the United States, but one of the big reasons Debian still has a non-free
> >   section is because Adobe in Japan asserts copyright over just this sort
> >   of thing. 
> 
> Again, this does not cover the PMF files. The original files have been
> commited by Hewlett-Packard under the MIT/X Consortium license many many
> years ago (and the files for the Postscript DDX were later refreshed by
> me to fix a minor bug - and I committed them under the same license:
> MIT/X.org). The so-called "copyright" notice in these files is just an
> attribute which informs the application that the attribute "COPYRIGHT"
> has a value. But this value does not relicense the file itself away from
> the MIT/X.org license. That would be the same as "relicesing" this email
> just because it references the string.

Okay, I'll take your word for it on this part.

> References or index data of this kind cannot be copyrighted, neither in
> the US nor in Japan nor elsewhere in the world.

I am afraid I'm not persuaded here, but I'm not really the person to argue
with about it.  Hamish Moffatt, who maintains xpdf-chinese-simplified,
xpdf-chinese-traditional, xpdf-japanese, and xpdf-korean, is.

If you're right, that'd be great.  If I understand correctly what is
keeping those packages in Debian non-free, then maybe we can move them to
Debian main.

In any case, if you're right about the blanket submission of the "original
files" under the MIT/X Consortium license, then the issue is surely void.
If they're not copyrightable, they're free for us.  If they're
copyrightable and MIT/X licensed, they're also free for us.

> > I will try to find this discussion in Debian's list archives
> > if you're interested.
> 
> Sure. It may be possible that Adobe Japan did some tricky stuff with CID
> fonts, but again this doesn't apply to something which has been
> explicitly commited under the MIT/X.org license by the authors.

I wish there were a historical record to refer to in this case, but as I
said, I'll take your word for it until I hear a persuasive case to the
contrary.

Thanks for the explanation!

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |      Never underestimate the power of
Debian GNU/Linux                   |      human stupidity.
branden at debian.org                 |      -- Robert Heinlein
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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