RE: [Plib-devel] legal matters

[Fay J. F C. AAC/W. <joh...@eg...>]

Oh, dear!

It is indeed a beautiful day today.  If I may misquote a twenty-year-old
movie ("Romancing the Stone"), "What did you do, lady, wake up this morning
and decide, 'Today I'm going to ruin some guy's life'?"  I just mentioned on
the "freeglut" list that there is a Category 4 hurricane headed in my
direction (should be Category 3 by the time it gets here ... knock on wood)
so if you want anything from me you'd better get to it in the next seven
hours or so.

I think I will wait for Steve's response on this one.  The "freeglut" file
status is even more vague because it has had stuff added from the OpenGLUT
library.  GLUT, by the way, doesn't say anything about other people's
copyrights on the bitmap fonts.  It does give Sun Microsystems copyright
info for the stroke fonts.

John F. Fay
Technical Fellow, Jacobs/Sverdrup TEAS Group
joh...@eg...
850-729-6330 
-----Original Message-----
From: pli...@li...
[mailto:pli...@li...] On Behalf Of Melchior FRANZ
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 4:40 AM
To: pli...@li...
Cc: Pawel W. Olszta
Subject: [Plib-devel] legal matters

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/g
enfonts.c?rev=1.1&cvsroot=FlightGear-0.9&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-marku
p
[2]
http://cvs.flightgear.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/FlightGear/src/GUI/fon
ts.cxx?rev=1.2&cvsroot=FlightGear-0.9&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the 'Do More With Dual!' webinar happening
July 14 at 8am PDT/11am EDT. We invite you to explore the latest in dual
core and dual graphics technology at this free one hour event hosted by HP, 
AMD, and NVIDIA.  To register visit http://www.hp.com/go/dualwebinar
_______________________________________________
plib-devel mailing list
pli...@li...
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plib-devel