[tex-live] Re: License of fonts included in X.org sources

[Frank Küster]

Daniel Stone <daniels at debian.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 02:50:32PM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
>> > Do you know which person we could contact among the X.org people?  
>
> More context, please.  Which fonts?

In this special case, it's about the Utopia fonts 

gsfonts-other-6.0/putbi.pfa gsfonts-other-6.0/putb.pfa
gsfonts-other-6.0/putri.pfa gsfonts-other-6.0/putr.pfa

> Fonts are a particularly hairy area of our licensing.  If the licence
> information rests with 'the X consortium', then it may well still be
> tied up deep in the corridors of TOG, or within the old X.Org group.
> In any case, the current X.Org Foundation doesn't have it in any
> official sense, but knowing which font is a good start.
>
> Try xorg at lists.freedesktop.org; some of the people from the old XC
> still hang around there.

Well, the problem was that someone probably already did that:

,---- Here is an excerpt from Thanh's mail (tex-fonts at math.utah.edu):
| 
|     However I am not sure that I can modify them to add
|     vietnamese support, because I am very ignorant of
|     license/copyright issues 
| 
|     Concerning Adobe Utopia, I did my best to try to find out
|     the answer, but without success: I asked people at Adobe
|     first and got a response saying that they have granted the
|     font license to X Consortium, so now only X Consortium can
|     grant the permission to modify these fonts. I wrote to X.Org
|     and got a response saying that  my question is being processed
|     and then nothing (it was a few months ago). So I gave it up.
`----

This is why I asked whether anybody knows about a specific person we
could contact.  Or at least about a subject that might attract the
people who might know.

TIA, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer