Re: [Lmuse-developer] feta licensing issues II

[Orcan O. <oge...@gm...>]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 12:19 AM, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 6:29 AM, Florian Jung wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> as I now will create my own score-edit branch on svn, i now need to know
>> how to handle the feta font licensing stuff
>> i will NOT rip these images from a gpl2ed versio of feta in near future,
>> this is too much time i can spend on better things (for example the
>> score editor ;) ). if someone of you wants to, feel free to do it ;)
>>
>> is it okay when i keep a note in my source which tells you to download
>> some archive from my webspace, extract it somewhere and change FONT_PATH
>> appropriately?
>> then muse2 stays gpl2, feta stays gpl3, and whoever wants to test the
>> score editor (it's only intended for devs), he has to do some archive
>> extracting stuff.
>>
>> is that okay for you and legal?
>>
>>
>>
>> btw, i suggest changing muse's license to gpl3. i assume you distribute
>> it under "the gpl2 or - at your option - any later license", so this
>> should not be some problem, but solve some problems ;)
>>
>> greetings
>> flo
>>
>
> Florian, I am currently investigating the issue. I have a feeling
> that it would be okay to distribute the fonts in a tarball as long as
> we don't compile it into the final executable. But as with all GPL
> stuff, we need to distribute the font sources, or at least provide a
> way for anyone to reach at their sources. I will let you know once I
> have a final answer.
>

I consulted some people at Fedora and in GNU (no lawyers though). The
average response I got was: Since fonts are not code, you cannot talk
about "linking" as you do with libraries. It is okay to continue
releasing use under "GPLv2 or later". No need to switch the whole code
to "GPLv3". We can just put a note aside, telling that the fonts we
use are GPLv3.

I would imagine, if this really creates an issue, we'll get a warning
in advance. So, I would say, go ahead and commit the fonts.

Cheers,
Orcan