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

[Ralf Stubner]

Daniel Stone <daniels at debian.org> writes:

> 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?

I digged into groups.google.com and found the original press release:

http://groups.google.de/group/comp.windows.x/browse_thread/thread/d351921a604a4039/a3e406813544b498

Mountain View, Calif. (October 9, 1991) - Adobe Systems Incorporated today
announced it has donated four typefaces from its Utopia(R) typeface family
in Adobe's Type 1 font format to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
X Consortium. 
[....]

Of course, it says nothing about the license agreement between Adobe and
the MIT X Consortium. There are several quotes from the README as found
in X11R5:

http://groups.google.de/group/comp.fonts/browse_thread/thread/e9fb6bf9e7307b55/0fb5cf456fc7c5bb
http://groups.google.de/group/comp.fonts/browse_thread/thread/f220077dbf0a69e0/dcce8a6a0702ffdb
http://groups.google.de/group/comp.fonts/browse_thread/thread/66b0e1a98caf514f/c3f51fb7aa5641af

,----
| In the interests of furthering standards for the X Window System, Adobe
| Systems Incorporated has contributed to the X Consortium and its members
| the Adobe typeface software listed below. This Adobe Type 1 font software
| donation will now allow users to experience and freely use traditional
| high-quality Adobe type in the X Window environment.
| 
| Permission to use, reproduce, display and distribute the listed typefaces
| is hereby granted, provided that the Adobe Copyright notice appears in all
| whole and partial copies of the software and that the following trademark
| symbol and attribution appear in all unmodified copies of the software:
| 
|         Copyright (c) 1989 Adobe Systems Incorporated
|         Utopia (R)
|         Utopia is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated
| 
| The Adobe typefaces (Type 1 font program, bitmaps and Adobe Font Metric
| files) donated are:
| 
|         Utopia Regular
|         Utopia Italic
|         Utopia Bold
|         Utopia Bold Italic
| 
| Adobe Systems Incorporated 
`----

Which is more or less what we have on CTAN now. I think it would be good
if this were readded to the X.org CVS, so that the utopia fonts could be
included in xfonts-scalable-nonfree again.

Of course, asking Adobe to clarify the situation would be even better.

cheerio
ralf