Re: [Freebangfont-devel] RE: FREE Bangla Software Avro Keyboard - NewVersion Available

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Saturday 20 September 2003 09:05, Andy wrote:
> Hello,
>
> The following is my own opinion and I have not spoken with the development
> members of FBF with regard to this matter.
>
> It is true that I did not notice your acknowledgement on you main page and
> I am sorry for that.
>
> I think you need to put some kind of acknowledgement on your fonts download
> page. You definitely need to draw attention to the fonts licence agreement
> before a user can download a raw TTF. IMHO Mentioning the creators of the
> fonts by their names would be even better.

Yes, it's clear that there's no intent to violate the FBF licenses here, but I 
agree with Andy that there should be something on the download page itself 
that tells the user what license he or she is downloading things under. This 
holds not only for GPL fonts, but any other piece of software as well. It's 
important that such information be somehow available on the download page 
(maybe via links) because people might be led there from places other than 

http://www.omicronlab.com/avrokeyboard/download.htm

(some other site may decide to link there directly).

Also, even though you acknowledge the FBF project, you don't explicitly state 
the license. Downloaders should (1) know that what they are downloading is 
under the GPL and (2) they may not know what the GPL is, so you should have a 
link to the GPL, either in a local file, or from the FSF site 

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

This is also true for the Avro Keyboard bundle. Users who have downloaded the 
whole package should be made aware that some components are under this 
particular license called the GPL. In my opinion, the advertisement of 
GPL-ness is much more important than the prominence of individual credits, 
especially because the awareness of software licenses needs a lot of 
improvement among the target population of bengali software.


> I repeat my question. What is the licensing policy with these fonts?
>
> You are NOT ALLOWED to distribute the fonts on you site unless you either:
>
>       1. include the font's licence agreement with the fonts.
> or    2. Alternatively, you may draw a person's attention to the licence's
> existence before they are allowed to access the fonts (e.g. a link to the
> agreement).
>
> (Please note that I am not an expert in licensing policys) I do not know
> the position as to legality of including the fonts as part of your
> package's download. Are you rich enough to be able to pay back Microsoft if
> the decided to charge you?
>
> I do not know if there are any restrictions with regard to the distributing
> the Microsoft font. It is the first time I have seen it.
>
> I am extremely interested to know as to which Public group you found the
> Microsoft font. Please let me know so that I can join it!

I think I know about this, and I'm pretty sure the person who posted this 
violated the agreement MS provided this font to him under. I doubt MS is 
going to prosecute, but Vrindra is definitely not publicly available now, and 
I doubt that it's ever going to be released under a license that permits 
redistribution anyway.

Deepayan