[Plib-devel] legal matters

[Melchior F. <mf...@us...>]

It's a beautiful day today, so I thought "why not stir up a hornet's nest?".
Just for fun.  :-P

The file fnt/fntBitmap.cxx contains data of seven fonts. Above that there's
a copyright message by the author of the genfonts utility, where he claims
ownership of copyright and grants permissions. Very generous and all, but:
he doesn't really own anything in this file! These are fonts that are
"Copyright by Adobe Systems Incorporated and Digital Equipment Corporation
(All Rights Reserved.)" IANAL, but this doesn't look good to me. How can
the author of a font conversion utility turn the copyright of converted
fonts into his own? He owns the rights to the converter utility. Only!
Nothing more. Nothing less. The generated fonts are derived work and still
copyright by Adobe and DEC. (Or do I miss something?)

I think it would be a good idea for plib (and freeglut!) to remove these
illegal copyright messages, and put the real ones in. That's what we did
in FlightGear, where we use a modified version of genfonts, too[1]. The
generated file fonts.cxx[2] credits Adobe/DEC and Bitstream, as I think it
should. (I assume that the use of Helvetica in this way per se is allowed.
It surely is for the Bitstream fonts.)

Note that I don't want to teach anybody anything. I don't really care much
about this issue in the plib & freeglut context (and I won't tell Adobe/DEC).
But I *do* care about FlightGear, and thought that you might be interested
in this theory.  :-)

m.


PS: In case you are interested in what we are doing to plib and with it,
    here are some screenshots:
    http://members.aon.at/mfranz/fgfs_gui.jpg   [78 kB]
    http://members.aon.at/mfranz/fgfs_gui2.jpg  [215 kB]
    http://members.aon.at/mfranz/fgfs_gui6.jpg  [264 kB]

[1] http://cvs.flightgear.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/FlightGear/utils/gui/genfonts.c?rev=1.1&cvsroot=FlightGear-0.9&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
[2] http://cvs.flightgear.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/FlightGear/src/GUI/fonts.cxx?rev=1.2&cvsroot=FlightGear-0.9&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup