Re: X.org licenses

[Ludovic Courtès]

Andreas Enge <address@hidden> skribis:

> I started adding license information to the 184 packages in the X11 
> distribution, and did not get very far... There is a list of several very 
> similar licenses used, see
>    http://www.xfree86.org/current/LICENSE5.html
>
> Number 5.11 is referred to as x11 in license.scm; is it okay to use x11 for 
> all others as well?

I would say so, yes.

> font-adobe-utopia-* has this strange license:
>
> 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
>
> There is no explicit permission to modify the fonts. On the other hand, the 
> sentence speaking of "umodified copies" seems to imply that modified copies 
> may also be distributed.
>
> The license of font-bh-* has the same ambiguity as far as modification is 
> concerned:
>
> This is the LEGAL NOTICE pertaining to the Lucida fonts from Bigelow & 
> Holmes:

The <http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Software_blacklist> lists Lucida as
non-free, but does not mention the others.  So I guess Utopia is OK, but
Lucida is not.

> Worst of all so far:
> font-daewoo-misc has the following COPYING:
>
> "Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Daewoo Electronics Co.,Ltd."

If there’s nothing else written, then it’s definitely non-free.

Thanks for the investigation!

Ludo’.