Re: Licensing issue: farsi_fonts

[Christian Perrier <bubulle at debian dot org>]

> The original source of the Koodak font is unknown, and the version this font 
> is based on, had a copyright phrase of "(c) 1999 Everybody!". You may freely 
> redistribute this font, but you may not change it in any way. Versions with 
> other licensing will become available from Sharif FarsiWeb, which you may 
> contact at http://www.farsiweb.info/ or mailto:fwpg at sharif dot edu.
> 
> I think this is a problem!


Actually not for Arabeyes to distribute them, imho....but this
explains why we don't distribute some of these fonts in Debian
(Youssef, Adnène and I had a small exchange about this issue in the
Debian Bug Tracking System).

Then, it becomes a "political" choice from Arabeyes to decide whether
distributing unmodifiable material is Good or Evil.

Getting a clearer license and releasing all fonts under GPL seemed to
be a goal of Farsiweb Inc.....

Now that his founder (Behdad) has been hired by Red Hat, one may
expect some work to happen on this issue. I just expect it to happen
the right way (ie making the fonts free software) and not the wrong
way like you can always expect from commercial distros vendors....:-)

In the meantime, Debian has a shrinked ttf-farsiweb package with only
Homa, Nazli and Titr...which is actually already Good as Nazli is used
in our future graphical installer to render Persian AND Arabic..:-)