Re: [9fans] docfonts problem

[EBo <ebo@sandien.com>]

As I said, I would ask Bigelow & Holmes for final clarification before
releasing anything.  I am not trying to dance around the license, but get
clarification on what is OK.  I have made it a habit of asking people here,
and elsewhere, if there they would mind if I do something in a particular
way.  I have even caught flack for asking 9fans before "showing them the
code", but it is exactly this kind of toe stepping that I like to avoid.  I
could go through the dance steps of how portage can download multiple
source trees to build stuff, but you have made it quite clear how you feel
about it. 

Now for the problem behind all this.  I am basically required to use troff
for formatting the iwp9 paper submissions.  I have asked repeatedly for the
a TeX macros, or the source for an acceptable macro.ms equivalents.  All of
these requests have been greeted with silence because someone, and I would
have to guess who, is discouraging the use of TeX for these submissions. 
Frankly troff has been a pain, and I do not use it for anything else, and
will not except for necessary plan9 related documentation.  Thanks for the
work around BTW, but next time I rebuild plan9port it will be blown away
unless I add these dance steps to the ebuilds.  See the chicken ant the egg
problem?

As for Gentoo, I would have to go through a formal review before having
them added to any repository AND the licensing field in portage ebuilds
explicitly contain all the licenses of the software used to build the
programs.  So, gentoo would know right off -- I would not hide it.  Also,
there are ebuilds for proprietary closed-source programs in gentoo, though
not many.

On Sun, 12 Sep 2010 11:42:13 -0400, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
>>> do you have the fonts?
>>> they do not come with plan9port, because the
>>> postscript fonts cannot be redistributed except
>>> with plan 9 itself.
>>
>> turns out no.  Here is a sticky question (one I will likely have to
>> write
>> Bigelow & Holmes for final clarification), but if I write a script
>> (portage
>> ebuild) which downloads and extracts the fonts into plan9port so all
this
>> works.  Is this a violation of their license?  I would not be
>> redistributing it, but would this be considered a derivative work?
> 
> where would the script download them from?
> whoever makes them available for download
> separate from plan 9 is violating that license.
> further, this kind of dancing on the edge of a knife
> approach to software licensing is not typically
> looked kindly upon by the distributions.  i bet
> gentoo would object if they found out.
> 
> honestly, i wouldn't play these games.
> 
> bigelow & holmes granted plan9port a license to
> distribute plan 9's lucida bitmap fonts as long as
> they were named something other than lucida
> (that's why the directories are named luc instead
> of lucida), and that same license explicitly excluded
> plan 9's lucida sans postscript fonts.  they were very
> gracious about licensing even the bitmap fonts when
> there was little benefit to them other than good will.
> instead of violating the spirit and possibly the letter
> of both licenses, i would suggest that you use the
> postscript fonts that i substituted in their place, namely
> luxi sans, also by bigelow & holmes.  the ms macros
> that ship with plan9port use them if you start your
> document with
> 
>     .FP luxisans
> 
> they have equally good unicode coverage and a
> similar look to lucida sans.
> 
> if you do write such a script to pull the lucida fonts
> out automatically and drop them in, please don't use
> the name plan9port to describe the resulting software.
> i don't want any part of it.
> 
> thanks.
> russ