On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 6:38 AM, Alexis Murzeau wrote: > I have a question regarding the font-awesome v5 [0] and the DFSG. > > Since version 5, font-awesome upstream repository contains both source > files and generated files but not the build system [1].
I would like to point out here that the build system exists, but is both secret and proprietary, because upstream have a proprietary version of the fonts that they are selling: "Because Font Awesome sales a Pro version our build system will for the time being remain private (we've got all of our for-pay icons in there)." > So it is not possible to regenerate generated files from source files > without guessing which file are generated and which are sources. > I've asked upstream about that [2] (but no response yet). Personally, I don't consider things proper Free Software unless they are built using an automatic, repeatable and reproducible/deterministic mechanism from freely licensed source using only tools that are themselves proper Free Software. Modification of that source also must be possible using only tools that are themselves proper Free Software. In addition I don't accept something as proper Free Software if upstream has created one form of data from another, truer, source form, thrown away the source form (or never saved it) and then distributes only the prebuilt form, which they use as if it were source but in truth intend to keep it read-only. Debian's standards are somewhat lower, we require source be available and DFSG-freely licensed. In addition the ftp-master policy (not sure about the rest of Debian) has a policy that packages be buildable (but not necessarily built) using tools only in main. We don't yet require an automated build process, we don't yet require rebuilding from source by Debian, we don't yet require reproducible/deterministic builds, we don't have a policy about tools to modify the source, we err on the side of taking upstream's word for it about source and we don't have any policy about what counts as proper source. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise