Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add ttf-symbola.

[Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com>]

Ian Denhardt (2014-10-23 21:36 +0400) wrote:

> Quoting Eric Bavier (2014-10-23 10:14:02)
>>
>> Andreas Enge writes:
>>
>> > On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 08:51:04PM +0400, Alex Kost wrote:
>> >> «In lieu of a licence: Fonts in this site are offered free for any use;
>> >> they may be opened, edited, modified, regenerated, posted, packaged and
>> >> redistributed.»
>> >> Is it OK to use "fsf-free" for this package?
>> >
>> > To me, this sounds like "public-domain".
>>
>> I was thinking the same.
>
> To me this sounds like "author does not understand licensing/copyright."
> It's pretty obvious the intent is some kind of simple permissive thing
> (whether that's a license or public domain), but it's not clear to me
> how much legal ambiguity there is. IANAL, but for certain entities, the
> ambiguity can be a problem (suppose, for example, you're a designer
> wanting to use this font for something, but you work somewhere with a
> strict legal department that doesn't think this qualifies as a license -
> you may be out of luck).
>
> You run into issues around certain packages, like sqlite-docs, where
> they end up being technically non-free because the developers decide
> "copyright is silly, I'm not going to deal with this." I sympathize,
> but...
>
> We ought to be careful about this one - maybe ask someone at the FSF
> about whether this meets their standards, and if not maybe ask the
> developer if they can put something less ambiguous on it.

According to <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html> such
questions may be asked at <licensing@fsf.org>.  But I'm afraid I'm not
able to ask about it properly.