Hey Rob, Thank you *so* much for this information. That's really helpful.
I don't know where that puts us now. Can we say that FontAwesome of any version is DFSG-free, given that the original sources are not available for any version of the font? How do we move forward? debian-legal - your input here would be most welcome. And Rob - if you are able to give any advice here, that would also be welcome. We *do* want to keep FontAwesome around - it is so amazing (awesome?!) and so ubiquitous! Best wishes, Julian On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 01:38:28PM -0500, Rob Madole wrote: > Hey all, > Stepping in again to provide some context. For those unfamiliar I’m an > engineer > at Font Awesome since the version 4 days. > 1. SVG files that you find in any of our packages (even back to version 4) are > artifacts and NOT source files. We’ve authored icons in a variety of tools > over > the years but no one has ever directly edited SVG files. They are always an > output format that are intentionally optimized and lossy to some degree. > 2. Any FontForge metadata you see is facilitated by a build system. A human > never ran the desktop FontForge app to then generate files. It was always > scripted. > 3. The fontawesome-webfont.svg file from version 4 was also never a source > file > (regardless of whether the ForkAwesome folks considered it as such) It was > also > a generated file from FontLab _I think_. > Happy to answer questions that pop up so speculation doesn’t have to win the > day. > > On May 18, 2026, at 10:42 AM, Julian Gilbey <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear all, > > On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 06:39:10PM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote: > > On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 05:52:49PM +0100, Nathan Willis wrote: > [...] > > I may have missed something in here, but how do you know that the SVGs > in > the > font are not the source SVGs? > > Hi Nathan! > > Good question; I'm not sure we do. The SVG font file > (fontawesome-webfont.svg) begins: > [...] > > So perhaps this is the original source for the font. FontForge is > quite happy to open it and allow editing, and this would not be a > reason to consider FontAwesome 4.7.0 to be non-DFSG free. > [...] > Looking further at FontAwesome 4.7.0: > > * fontawesome-webfont.{eot,ttf} and FontAwesome.otf all contain the > string "FONTLAB:OTFEXPORT", so presumably these were generated by > FontLab (non-free software) > > * I don't know how to uncompress the .woff/.woff2 files to see if > there is any identifying information there. But my guess is that > these were also generated using FontLab. > [...] > > Thinking more about it, how about the following transition process? > > * Strip all of the fontawesome-webfont.* and FontAwesome.otf files > from the source package except for the SVG one. > > * Regenerate all of these fonts using FontForge; here's a simple > script that will do fine with a little tweaking: > > ----- > #!/usr/bin/python3 > > import fontforge > > SVG = "/tmp/fontawesome-webfont.svg" > TTF = "/tmp/fontawesome-webfont.ttf" > WOFF = "/tmp/fontawesome-webfont.woff" > WOFF2 = "/tmp/fontawesome-webfont.woff2" > OTF = "/tmp/FontAwesome.otf" > > fa = fontforge.open(SVG) > fa.copyright = "Copyright Dave Gandy 2016. All rights reserved." > fa.version = "4.7.0" > fa.sfntRevision = 4.007 > fa.ascent = 1536 > fa.descent = 256 > > for font in [TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, OTF]: > fa.generate(font) > ----- > > Note that this does not generate the EOT font; that is fine, as it is > specific to Internet Explorer and is not needed for Microsoft Edge, so > is not needed on Debian systems (unless they are serving to old MS > Windows machines). If really needed, we could generate that too using > eot-utils. > > Then my suggestion is that fonts-font-awesome-legacy stores its fonts > in /usr/share/fonts-font-awesome (not > /usr/share/fonts-font-awesome-legacy), and includes FontAwesom 4.7.0 > (with this minor change). The control fields will be roughly, for the > time being: > > Package: fonts-font-awesome-legacy > Conflicts and Replaces: fonts-font-awesome (<< 7) > contains FontAwesome versions 4.7.0, 5.x, 6.x > > Package: fonts-font-awesome > Version: 7.x > Depends: fonts-font-awesome-legacy > contains FontAwesome version 7.x > > Once these are both in testing, we file normal severity bugs against > all packages that build-depend or depend on fonts-font-awesome asking > them to either switch to fonts-font-awesome-legacy or to ensure that > their package will continue to work with fonts-font-awesome 7.x, and > close the bug when they have done so. Then in forky+1 (or perhaps > sooner), we can drop the fonts-font-awesome -> > fonts-font-awesome-legacy dependency. > > Thoughts before I proceed? > > Best wishes, > > Julian
