Negatori Font included in Egoboo is not compatible with GPL

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arand
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Re: Negatori Font included in Egoboo is not compatible with

Post by arand »

Sorry to dig this up from the grave, but since many of the points I'm talking about are addressed here I figured it would still make more sence to continue rather than restart.

I'm a part of the Debian Games Team, and also just started to look into Fedora packaging as well, and hence have looked a bit at Egoboo too (long history short, since Enet needed a transition to 1.3).

Just to clarify a few things :teach: :

1. There is actually no requrement for a font to be GPL-compatible in order to be distributed with Egoboo. Since if the font had additional restrictions they would apply to the font itself, and not to the Egoboo binaries (which are the thing being GPLed) Similar to the Egoboo data being CC-BY-SA the font can have it's own individual license (OFL 1.1 is common) and still be used.

2. However, in order for a font to get into most linux distributions, it is required to have a free/opensource license, and this would rule out for example NonCommercial or, as in the case of Mael, "No selling" restrictions.

3. A GPL-licensed font should ALWAYS have a "Font Exception" clause, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_font_exception.


Since GNU/Linux distributions tends to be rather nitpicky about these things (as you no doubt have already noticed :) There are a few things that would be nice if Egboboo could do:

1. For the fonts made by Egoboo, make a simple addition to the license as per http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException, one way to do this would be to add a fonts-copyright text file with this addition and a note which files are affected by it (Gnomish_digital, Egobooish and Squirkle, as far as I can tell are created by the community?).
Alternatively, and this is often times preferred, use a font-specific license (OFL 1.1) for these fonts.

2. Contact Bo Chen and ask if ey would care to add the font exception / relicense for his font - I am intending to do this myself if there are no other takers? Also provided you intend to continue using this font, are you?

3. Replace the Mael font. Though I understand that this is in fact not used at all in Egoboo currently?

Also, for finding nice open source fonts I can highly recommend http://www.google.com/webfonts, with the font sources available at http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/ (mercurial VCS)

<3
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Martin Werner
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