On Tuesday, June 2, 2026 11:28:49 PM Mountain Standard Time Julian Gilbey wrote: > On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 02:14:14PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > > [...] > > Fonts may have a preferred source form that is not textual but binary. > > For another example of that, see etoys which is in non-free despite > > being DFSG-free: It is kept out of main due to concerns that its source > > format might be too alien for the Debian security team to reasonably do > > audits on the codebase. > > > > But from a legal standpoint, code either have freely licensed *source* > > or they don't. And that applies to fonts in the sense that either the > > font *is* its own source or it isn't. > > [...] > > Dear all, > > I've been mulling over this, and have had a thought. > > I am not a font designer, but extrapolating from what Rob has been > saying, I think it is a reasonable presumption that most fonts are not > designed in FontForge or similar open source software. And that is > surely the case for a significant proportion of the fonts distributed > in Debian; we certainly don't get the "source code" for them (which, > in the case of FontForge, would be an SFD file). I looked at the > Debian source for a random font on my system, and all it contains is > the ttf files and the OFL license text. Looking at the upstream > webpage, the references there include guidance on how to use FontLab. > So presumably the ttf format is not the preferred upstream format for > this particular font. > > If we go down the route of excluding FontAwesome, it would also be > incumbent upon us to do an audit of all the fonts shipped by Debian, > and we would probably end up with almost no fonts at all, or have to > move them all to non-free.
Beginning many years ago, Debian used to ship a lot of fonts by simply packaging upstream TTF files. This is before my time, but from what I have read this was because open-source font systems either didn’t exist or weren’t packaged for Debian. In the intervening years that has generally been fixed. Because of that there has been a recent effort to go back and actually build all the fonts we used to just ship. As such, I think it would be appropriate for there to be a general audit of fonts and a removal to non-free of any font for which we don’t have the source or for which we can’t build it using a free toolchain. -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
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