Re: [Indlinux-group] AksharYogini font family released

[Christian P. <bu...@de...>]

Quoting Sudhanwa Jogalekar (sud...@gm...):

> 1. people comment on the mail/s directly without even visiting the
> referred site and reading the contents.

I am sorry for this, being one of those who did so.

But that raises an interesting point. Pointing the potential
reader/user to the web site in order to know the exact terms and
conditions for the use of some software (or font, in that case), is
restricting this to people who are online and, believe it or not, not
everybody is, all time long..:-)

> 2. If the first mail gave the correct URL
> (http://aksharyogini.sudhanwa.com), at least some further mails would
> have avoided.

Well, at least, being the ignorant that I am, I would have learned who
Yogini Joglekar is (I think that, whatever is done in the license in
the future, that mention -"She was a famous Marathi writer...- should
be added to the current text).

> 
> 3. In the copyright notice within the font, it clearly says: Usage of
> this font "Aksharyogini" is subject to the terms and conditions
> mentioned on the website http://aksharyogini.sudhanwa.com. You can
> read this using gnome-font-viewer.K font viewer does not show that.
> All the debian font related packages I saw, everywhere the terms and
> conditions/licenses is mentioned under the copyright file section.

In debian/copyright to be precise, which is installed as
/usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright.

All *official* Debian packages must give the licensing conditions in
that file. If they don't, this is a release critical bug. One should
note that NEW packages uploaded to the archive are inspected very
carefully by Debian ftpmasters. THat has not always been the case and
some older package may have escaped that inspection.

About the binary package that provides the AksharYogini fonts
(ttf-devanagari-fonts), this is done
in /usr/share/doc/ttf-devanagari-fonts/copyright.

> 4. The terms and conditions mentioned are very simple, clear and
> straight forward for any common user. People usually run away if they
> see something called "license". Unfortunately, in the FOSS world, it
> is (probably) the most sacred word.

Because, this is the ground on which Free Software is based. It is
thus fairly logical that people involved in Free Software are
sensitive (and often very clever) about licensing conditions.


> 
> 5. I was under the impression that Debian is THE FREE (as in FOSS)
> distro. I did some digging and to my surprise, found that it has
> non-free components also. (could be very less but it is there.) eg.
> Package: t1-xfree86-nonfree (4.2.1-3) [non-free] that is mentioned
> here: http://packages.debian.org/stable/x11/t1-xfree86-nonfree

non-free is not part of Debian.

It is provided as a courtesy to our users and maintained on a best
effort basis. For instance, the security team does not follow packages
in non-free. A general agreement in the project is to acknowledge that
some of our users may need software which is non free for various
reasons, so if we can provide them with such software and, to some
extent, with the same packaging quality we provide in other packages,
we do it.

But, again, non-free is not part of Debian. It is provided on the same
hosts than the Debian archive but, for instance, not pointed by default.

> 
> 6. As such, if non-free components are also allowed in Debian, why
> people are talking as if this font is kind of "untouchable"

That's not the point. The point (at least with my Debian hat) is
deciding whether it is possible to have this font in Debian as part of
the official Debian archive, namely *not* non-free.

I am in no way a specialist in Indic languages, I can't even judge on
the technical quality of the font. However, given the credit I give to
the expertise of some people in this community, I think that this font
deserves the effort of having it in Debian (and the same stands for
other distributions, or other Free Software environments such as
OpenSolaris)....*if the font's license allows for it*.

So, please don't take this as offensive to the font and/or the font
author. This is the exact contrary. We pointed that the current license
seems to have some missing information to make it free with regard to
the Debian Free Software Guidelines (which are used even outside
Debian to define what is considered Free Software and what is
not)...and we are trying to find out what could be improved to make it
free....without changing the spirit of the font

Currently, ttf-devanagari-fonts is part of Debian main. However, given
the license, I'm not sure it should. In Debian Social Contract, which
all Debian developers committed to, it is said "We will not hide
problems". This is a potential problem and we have to deal with it.



> 
> 7. People are "free" to select/deselect the fonts from Debian  or any
> other distro.

The point here is that, given the information we have, I should file a
release critical bug against the source package providing AksharYogini
fonts because it provides a binary package that includes non-free
material.

That release critical would mean we should drop the *source* package
that provides ttf-devanagari-fonts from Debian main. That is
ttf-indic-fonts, which provides.....most of the most usable fonts for
Indic languages.

We certainly don't want this and this is why this thread is here: to
address that issue and try finding a solution.

I can actually see 3 ways to go:

- to be convinced that the current license is free with regards of the
DFSG (http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines)

- change the license for a license that's compatible with DFSG. That
does not necessarily mean that the spirit of the original license
should be dropped. There are certainly enough  existing licenses
floating around that may fit the will of the copyright holder(s)

- drop the font from the ttf-indic-fonts package



> 
> Apart from the above,
> 
> We (my family) believe that this is the only font released (at least
> in India. Unaware about other countries) in the name of an author.
> 
> 3500 downloads is more than what we expected and the basic purpose of
> releasing the font is being served. Getting it in Debian has helped in
> this. Thanks to the FOSS community for the same.


About this, you mentioned having no idea of the number of installs.

The following may help:
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=ttf-indic-fonts

It show that, out of all Debian systems that use the
popularity-contest package, 7% of them have the package
installed....which is huge.