[task #15914] Submission of Intlfonts

[Ineiev]

Follow-up Comment #3, task #15914 (project administration):

The Information for Maintainers of GNU Software
<https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html#Copyright-Notices>
says,


You should maintain a proper copyright notice and a license notice in each
nontrivial file in the package.
...
Some formats do not have room for textual annotations; for these files, state
the copyright and copying permissions in a README file in the same directory.


The format of the file in question does allow for comments, so it should
include them.

The GPL Howto <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html> explains why:


...programmers often copy source files from one free program into another. If
a source file contains no statement about what its license is, then moving it
into another context eliminates all trace of that point. This invites
confusion and error.


I believe this applies to a font file quite well, even better than to a
typical source file of a program: people can copy it alone as is, and it will
provide a set of characters for them.

Anyway, the README file in Ethiopic/ doesn't really contain valid copyright
and license notices <https://savannah.nongnu.org/maintenance/ValidNotices/>,
either.

P.S. After a closer look, I realized that I can't tell the intended licensing
conditions of those files based on the contents of the tarball: the README in
the topmost directory only says that they are public domain or "freely
usable", and Ethiopic/README says "GNU Copyleft" which is more than ambiguous;
if they are copylefted with a GNU license, the (re-)distributor must provide
the source file for ethio24f-uni.bdf, that is, ethio300-uni.bdf, but that file
is absent from the tarball; in other words, the tarball may be technically
unredistributable.

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