On Tue, May 19, 2026 at 09:54:04AM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote: > On Monday, May 18, 2026 10:44:34 PM Mountain Standard Time Julian Gilbey > wrote: > > 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. > > I cannot speak for the entire debian-legal community, but as one of the more > prolific posters on the list, these are my thoughts.
Hi Soren, Thanks for these thoughts! A few comments interspersed. > 1. SVG is not always the preferred form of modification for fonts, but it > *can be* the preferred form of modification for fonts. This is similar to > HTML, which sometimes is the original file and other times was generated from > something else that was the original file. > > 2. It is clear that SVG was not the preferred form of modification for the > original FontAwesome project. > > 3. It isn’t clear to me without doing further research if SVG was the > preferred form of modification for the ForkAwesome project. Yes, SVG was the preferred form of modification: to the best of my understanding, the SVG files were regarded as the master icon files in the ForkAwesome project. > 4. Seeing as how both FontAwesome and ForkAwesome are now archived projects, > they are not receiving further modifications upstream. This is not quite correct: FontAwesome version 4.7.0, which is used by a *lot* of packages, is "archived" - there are no further changes to version 4. But FontAwesome continues to grow and develop, and we currently have versions 5, 6 (both legacy) and 7 (current) in Debian (in the fonts-font-awesome-legacy and node-fortawesome-fontawesome-free packages respectively). > 5. Because it is possible for us to build the ForkAwesome fonts from SVG in > Debian, because SVG can be considered an valid source format for fonts, and > because the upstream ForkAwesome files are no longer being modified, I don’t > think there is a significant DFSG concern to using them as the source files > for the purpose of packaging. For the purpose of packaging ForkAwesome, I presume you mean? > 6. If someone is concerned about #5, it would be possible for someone to > fork > ForkAwesome, give it a new name, and, for the purposes of the fork, declare > that the SVG files are now the preferred form of modification and that any > future modifications will be made by directly editing those files. Then, > that > fork could be packaged in Debian. I'd personally be happy to regard the SVGs in FontAwesome (all versions) as editable source files, as the ForkAwesome project did (and they are licensed under an open source licencd), but we now know for certain that they're not the actual source files (as they weren't for ForkAwesome). > It is possible that I have missed something or misunderstood the situation in > some way, so I would appreciate any critiques of the above. Best wishes, Julian
