[Freebangfont-devel] Re: [Ankur-core] Font licence - GPL vs LGPL

[Deepayan Sarkar]

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning.

On Friday 31 October 2003 06:15, Anirban Mitra wrote:
> Dear friends,
> All our fonts in Free Bangla Font Project are licenced under GPL.
> But I feel they should be licenced under LGPL. In that way
>
> 1. They can be distributed along with non-free commercial software.
> That way we will be spreading the concept of free software and GNU
> using the more numerous commercial media.

I see no reason why they can't be distributed along with commercial software 
right now (as GPL-d fonts). Distributing two (or more) things together in a 
single package, but with different licenses for different, _distinct_ parts, 
is perfectly acceptable and in no way violates the GPL if one of those 
licenses is the GPL.

> 2. Fonts are essentialy libraries, not an application software.
> Most of the font related libraries (including FreeType) are
> distributed as per provisions of LGPL.

How is the license of Freetype relevant to font licenses ? Fonts can be (and 
usually are) distributed as stand-alone entities (not 'libraries') that can 
be installed by the user (you might interpret that as being in some sense 
'compiled' and 'linked' with the font rendering engine, although I'm not sure 
if that's a valid way to look at it). In either case, I don't see any license 
issues here. It's perfectly legal to process a GPL-d font for use in a 
proprietary rendering engine, that obviously doesn't make the proprietary 
rendering engine GPL. 

> 3. The fonts can be used in embedded systemslike handhelds and
> cellphones based on linux when they start supporting Bangla.

If they are based on Linux, then where's the problem ? If not, I agree that 
there _may_ be issues regarding whether it's legal to distribute the fonts  
pre-installed, but I doubt very much that this would be a problem even with 
the GPL.

In general, the GPL is preferable over the LGPL, and I wouldn't want to change 
our licenses to LGPL unless there's a very good reason. Of course, we can't 
change the licence of Mukti Narrow even if we wanted to.

Deepayan