Hi Lyes!
On 1/14/22 5:19 PM, Lyes Saadi wrote:
Hello! And thank you for your answer!
well, I'm not sure I really have an answer - still trying to make sure
I understand the question!
Le 14/01/2022 à 04:53, Jilayne Lovejoy a écrit :
Hi Lyes,
I'm not sure I can help (in terms of actually removing the FE-legal
blocker in the issue), but I'm curious to see if I understand, from a
legal perspective, what has gone on here.
Am I correct that there was the Figlets fonts pacakge which contained
a bunch of different licenses, some of which were problematic for
Fedora. But the pyfiglet "port", as they call it, has done the work
of removing the problematic licenses thus creating a similar fonts
package with only the fonts under "good" licenses?
Not exactly, the original figlet package removed problematic licenses
a while ago, and, pyfiglet reintroduced other problematic fonts. But,
recently, one of the maintainers decided to go through all the fonts,
traced their origin and classified them. Those which had « good »
licenses now live in the `fonts-standard/` directory, while those
which had « bad » or unknown licenses where moved to the
`fonts-contrib/` directory! The new pyfiglet package does not include
the `fonts-contrib/` directory (I removed it from the tarball, and
thus the SRPM to comply with the licensing guidelines).
Looking at the Github repo, I also see the MIT license at the top
level. Your spec file notes there are many licenses, though, in the
actual font files. I browsed around a bit, but I was curious as to
how you discerned the other licenses? (i.e., manually looking or
otherwise?) Just curious as to some of the details of package
maintainer's process when it comes to licenses!
The entire breakdown can be found here :
https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/issues/89#issuecomment-899051848
(and in the comments following that one) ! And, I went through all the
fonts again to make sure there was nothing missing/no error.
I'm not sure I agree with the legal analysis of the copyrightability
of fonts as summarized, but I'm also not sure that matters if the
stated licenses for all the fonts in this package would be meet the
"good" criteria for Fedora.
We'd love to have all the fonts included if our legal argument is
solid enough, though, since there is no precedent in US courts (as far
as we know, we are no lawyers), I can understand why it is an issue
for the Fedora Project. But, yes, all the fonts which are now included
are in the « good » license list.
So the specific ask for Fedora now is - can we include the fonts in the
fonts-contrib/ directory as well, instead of only the fonts in the
fonts-standard/ directory - is that right?
I'm not really clear on what the licensing is for the font in the
fonts-contrib/ directory, as the few fonts I opened simply don't have
any explicit license info. Do you know if that is the case (and
therefore the problem in terms of redistribution in Fedora)?
Thanks,
Jilayne
On 10/23/21 12:30 PM, Lyes Saadi wrote:
Hello Legal,
I'm bringing back a discussion from 2012[1]: Figlet fonts!
Indeed, I am trying to package python-pyfiglet[2] as a dependency
for other
packages. But, after the review, it came up that a lot of weird
fonts were
included. At the time, I didn't know anything about the discussion,
and decided
to abort everything.
Recently though, a developer contacted me through the bug report,
and proposed
to help on the issue. He triaged the fonts and separated them
depending on
whether they were Open-Source or not, and we were thus able to
create a clean
package with none of the problematic fonts in it.
In that discussion[3], emerged the fact that a discussion over this
already
happened ([1]), but it seems that either no consensus was reached,
or that such
consensus was lost to time as I wasn't able to find any conversation
on figlet
either on legal or devel mailing lists archives. And, it seems that
the issue
was just simply avoided since figlet ended up removing the
problematic fonts
anyway.
But, upstream would like to keep the problematic fonts if possible
in Fedora.
And so, I would like to ask Legal to either give me the answer, if
it actually
was a settled matter, or to reach a consensus on Figlet fonts.
To resume the situation (as I understand it, I am not a lawyer,
obviously):
In the US, fonts glyphs are not copyright-able as it is considered
insufficiently creative. For the same reason, Bitmap fonts (fonts
defined pixel
by pixel) are also not copyright-able, as they are only considered
as data which
represents glyphs. But, Vector fonts (fonts defined using drawing
instructions
and code), is, on the other hand, copyright-able because it is
defined through a
software code.
Then, we come to Figlet fonts. For those not aware of what Figlet
fonts, they
are also known as ASCII fonts:
__ __ ____ __ ____
/ / / /__ / / /___ / / ___ ____ _____ _/ / /
/ /_/ / _ \/ / / __ \ / / / _ \/ __ `/ __ `/ / /
/ __ / __/ / / /_/ / / /___/ __/ /_/ / /_/ / /_/
/_/ /_/\___/_/_/\____( ) /_____/\___/\__, /\__,_/_(_)
|/ /____/
The issue with those is that no ruling (as far as I know) ever
concerned that
type of font in US Court. Though, one argument would be that Figlet
fonts are
similar to Bitmap fonts, as they only contain data about glyphs, and
do not, in
the same way as Vector fonts do, contain code giving to the computer
drawing
instructions for the fonts. As such Figlet fonts are not modular, or
extensible,
they just contain raw data about a font.
But still, all this is speculation, and, as I said, I am not a
lawyer, so I
don't have any slight idea if such a defense would hold in court.
I hope to have resumed the situation clearly enough and that I
didn't make any
mistake.
Greetings,
Lyes Saadi
[1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820642
[2]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1876108
[3]: https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/issues/89
PS: Can we remove the FE-legal blocker from the review request now
that all the
fonts have been sorted out?
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