Hi! Initialy the BDF core fonts were donated by companies like Adobe and B&H. Now the fonts distributed with XFree are not the same as the original -- they are reencoded in different encodings, many new gliphs are added. So I am wondering if XFree has permition to distribute modified fonts under registered trademarks (such as Helvetica).
I asked this question in the debian-legal mailing list because I maintain several font packages for Debian. You may be interested of this: > I seem to recall, that MS got into trouble with the names > Helvetica and Times Roman back around Windows 3.0 (1990), > because the bitmap fonts they provided by those names were not > licensed from the company that held those two trademarks. It > may even have gone to court. This quotation is from http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200302/msg00140.html I'd like to have your opinion before I take decision about the packages that I maintain in Debian. Latter my comment on the reaction of Microsoft follows (the quotations are from the same message): > 1. The fonts were renamed "MS Sans Serif" and "MS Serif". This means that we should rename the fonts not to use trademarks we don't own. > 2. The names "Tms Rmn" and "Helvetica" were no longer returned > by font enumeration APIs or displayed in menus etc. (Unless of > cause the user independently obtained genuine fonts by those > names...). I am not sure how to achieve this. > 3. A new "FontSubstitutes" configuration section was added and > prefilled with mappings from "Tms Rmn" to "MS Serif" and > "Helvetica" to "MS Sans Serif" . This allowed hardcoded fonts > in software and data to remain valid. The text I read noted > that this might be a special exception they negotiated, but it > was a technical book, not a law book. This probably means that we use aliases in fonts.alias and Xft. Anton Zinoviev _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
