Hello! And thank you for your answer!
Le 14/01/2022 à 04:53, Jilayne Lovejoy a écrit :
Hi Lyes,
I'm not sure I can help (in terms of actually removing the FE-legal
blocker in the issue), but I'm curious to see if I understand, from a
legal perspective, what has gone on here.
Am I correct that there was the Figlets fonts pacakge which contained
a bunch of different licenses, some of which were problematic for
Fedora. But the pyfiglet "port", as they call it, has done the work of
removing the problematic licenses thus creating a similar fonts
package with only the fonts under "good" licenses?
Not exactly, the original figlet package removed problematic licenses a
while ago, and, pyfiglet reintroduced other problematic fonts. But,
recently, one of the maintainers decided to go through all the fonts,
traced their origin and classified them. Those which had « good »
licenses now live in the `fonts-standard/` directory, while those which
had « bad » or unknown licenses where moved to the `fonts-contrib/`
directory! The new pyfiglet package does not include the
`fonts-contrib/` directory (I removed it from the tarball, and thus the
SRPM to comply with the licensing guidelines).
Looking at the Github repo, I also see the MIT license at the top
level. Your spec file notes there are many licenses, though, in the
actual font files. I browsed around a bit, but I was curious as to how
you discerned the other licenses? (i.e., manually looking or
otherwise?) Just curious as to some of the details of package
maintainer's process when it comes to licenses!
The entire breakdown can be found here :
https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/issues/89#issuecomment-899051848
(and in the comments following that one) ! And, I went through all the
fonts again to make sure there was nothing missing/no error.
I'm not sure I agree with the legal analysis of the
copyrightability
of fonts as summarized, but I'm also not sure that matters if the
stated licenses for all the fonts in this package would be meet the
"good" criteria for Fedora.
We'd love to have all the fonts included if our legal argument is solid
enough, though, since there is no precedent in US courts (as far as we
know, we are no lawyers), I can understand why it is an issue for the
Fedora Project. But, yes, all the fonts which are now included are in
the « good » license list.
Greetings,
Lyes Saadi
Cheers,
Jilayne
On 10/23/21 12:30 PM, Lyes Saadi wrote:
> Hello Legal,
>
> I'm bringing back a discussion from 2012[1]: Figlet fonts!
>
> Indeed, I am trying to package python-pyfiglet[2] as a dependency for
> other
> packages. But, after the review, it came up that a lot of weird fonts
> were
> included. At the time, I didn't know anything about the discussion,
> and decided
> to abort everything.
>
> Recently though, a developer contacted me through the bug report, and
> proposed
> to help on the issue. He triaged the fonts and separated them
> depending on
> whether they were Open-Source or not, and we were thus able to create
> a clean
> package with none of the problematic fonts in it.
>
> In that discussion[3], emerged the fact that a discussion over this
> already
> happened ([1]), but it seems that either no consensus was reached, or
> that such
> consensus was lost to time as I wasn't able to find any conversation
> on figlet
> either on legal or devel mailing lists archives. And, it seems that
> the issue
> was just simply avoided since figlet ended up removing the
> problematic fonts
> anyway.
>
> But, upstream would like to keep the problematic fonts if possible in
> Fedora.
> And so, I would like to ask Legal to either give me the answer, if it
> actually
> was a settled matter, or to reach a consensus on Figlet fonts.
>
> To resume the situation (as I understand it, I am not a lawyer,
> obviously):
> In the US, fonts glyphs are not copyright-able as it is considered
> insufficiently creative. For the same reason, Bitmap fonts (fonts
> defined pixel
> by pixel) are also not copyright-able, as they are only considered as
> data which
> represents glyphs. But, Vector fonts (fonts defined using drawing
> instructions
> and code), is, on the other hand, copyright-able because it is
> defined through a
> software code.
>
> Then, we come to Figlet fonts. For those not aware of what Figlet
> fonts, they
> are also known as ASCII fonts:
>
> __ __ ____ __ ____
>
> / / / /__ / / /___ / / ___ ____ _____ _/ / /
>
> / /_/ / _ \/ / / __ \ / / / _ \/ __ `/ __ `/ / /
>
> / __ / __/ / / /_/ / / /___/ __/ /_/ / /_/ / /_/
>
> /_/ /_/\___/_/_/\____( ) /_____/\___/\__, /\__,_/_(_)
>
> |/ /____/
>
>
> The issue with those is that no ruling (as far as I know) ever
> concerned that
> type of font in US Court. Though, one argument would be that Figlet
> fonts are
> similar to Bitmap fonts, as they only contain data about glyphs, and
> do not, in
> the same way as Vector fonts do, contain code giving to the computer
> drawing
> instructions for the fonts. As such Figlet fonts are not modular, or
> extensible,
> they just contain raw data about a font.
>
> But still, all this is speculation, and, as I said, I am not a
> lawyer, so I
> don't have any slight idea if such a defense would hold in court.
>
> I hope to have resumed the situation clearly enough and that I didn't
> make any
> mistake.
>
> Greetings,
> Lyes Saadi
>
> [1]:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820642
> [2]:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1876108
> [3]:
https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/issues/89
>
> PS: Can we remove the FE-legal blocker from the review request now
> that all the
> fonts have been sorted out?
> _______________________________________________
> legal mailing list -- legal(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> Fedora Code of Conduct:
>
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
> List Guidelines:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
> List Archives:
>
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org
> Do not reply to spam on the list, report it:
>
https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
_______________________________________________
legal mailing list --legal(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
To unsubscribe send an email tolegal-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Fedora Code of
Conduct:https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
List
Guidelines:https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
List
Archives:https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@lists.fedora...
Do not reply to spam on the list, report it:https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure