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

[George N. White III]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> writes:
>
>  > Right.  As I said earlier, it's probably tied up somewhere deep
>  > within TOG: no-one still involved with X today remembers this at
>  > all.
>
> Maybe it is sufficient to find someone at X.org who is willing to care
> about the legal stuff.  It is a great advantage that Thanh found
> someone at Adobe who remembers.
>
>  > So, unless you really, really, really, really, really,
>  > really need these fonts, it's not going to be worth the effort.
>
> There are some reasons why it's worth some effort:
> [...]

This is another good example of the need for sunset provisions to ensure 
that intellectual property doesn't become unavailable due to demise and/or 
lack of interest of the owner.

Lacking such provisions, the effort might be used better to extend the
virtual font mechanism to allow someone to create a new Type 1 font 
defining additional or replacement glyphs that will be used in combination
with some existing font.  This would be sufficiently useful outside the
TeX community that I think it stands a good chance of getting broad 
support.  One way to implement this would be to generate a temporary local
type 1 font, so the magic would all be hidden in mktfm without the need to
change pdfviewers, ghostscript, etc.

-- 
George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>