Re: [Freebangfont-devel] Licensing issues

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Tuesday 14 January 2003 09:52 am, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> The GPL states
>
>     b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
>     whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
>     part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
>     parties under the terms of this License.
>
> Does this mean that the fonts licensed under GPL would not be able to be
> installed in Windows?

Why would that be ? The paragraph above only concerns derived works, i.e., 
would apply when someone modifies a GPL'd font and then tries to distribute 
or publish it. So,

1. As long as someone is just using the font as it is, without making any 
changes, he/she is free to do whatever he/she wants with it, including 
installing it on Windows. 

2. When it comes to distributing it, that would have to be done under the GPL. 
As the section below says, if it's distributed along with some other 
application (which seems to be the relevant case here), it doesn't matter 
what the license of that application is, as long as the font is licensed 
under the GPL. This sort of thing is done all the time.

3. The only impact of the GPL is that if any of these third parties make any 
changes in the font (which they are free to do any time they want), AND then 
want to distribute it to someone else, they have to do it under the GPL and 
only the GPL. And I personally think that this is a Good Thing.


> Also, there is another section which states
>
>
> These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole.  If
> identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,
> and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in
> themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those
> sections when you distribute them as separate works.  But when you
> distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based
> on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of
> this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the
> entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote
> it.
> ....
>
> In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program
> with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of
> a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under
> the scope of this License.
>
> So does that solve our problem??
>
> This becomes relevant as I have been approached by several organizations
> (one even rang me up) who are trying to work on Windows/Office XP with
> the fonts.
>
> -cheers-
> sdg