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

[David Kastrup]

Daniel Stone <daniels at debian.org> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 08:21:08PM +0200, 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.
>
> We have a couple of people who deal with legal stuff (a lot of the
> time it's me sitting there going, 'y'know, "all rights reserved" and
> nothing else doesn't bear well for us distributing this'), but the
> problem in this case is the multitude of organisations.
>
> It may have been granted to:
>   * the defunct MIT-based X Consortium,
>   * directly to The Open Group,
>   * X.Org as part of TOG,
>   * X.Org Foundation.
>
> All the XOF people swear that they haven't heard of it.  If it's
> trapped in XC, then we're stuffed.  If it's deep within the annals of
> TOG, then they don't know about it on a surface inspection, and it
> would take absolutely ages to find out either way.  If it's within
> TOG-X.Org, then no-one who was around during those days knows about it,
> so it's likely been lost.
>
> See the problem?

Perhaps the easiest way out is to tell Adobe about the situation and
ask them whether they'd consider relicensing those fonts _again_, this
time to TUG or Dante, so as to clear up any issues.

Since they don't actively market them as far as I know, doing so for
something which is presumed to be in the open, anyway, might be good
PR.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum