[Scribus] font management

[Louis Desjardins]

>On Sun, 2005-04-17 at 14:53 -0400, Louis Desjardins wrote:
>
>>  If there will be an advice, I think it should be made clear to which
>>  font family it applies. Otherwise it's going to be really complicated
>>  for everyone to find out when GPL applies to a font.
>
>Agreed. I've added a reference to the GPL FAQ entry to the UnFonts
>listing on the wiki font page. There aren't any others listed there that
>I know are GPL. It's definitely something to watch out for though.
>
>>  I think it's
>>  only confusing and it should be clarified by the people responsible
>>  for the GPL. At the same time, are there lots of fonts known to be
>>  released under the GPL? In other words, is it a theoretical issue or
>>  a real-life issue?
>
>At least UnFonts, and I think I've seen others.
>
>>  Like I said, it needs clarification.
>
>The problem is that the FSF can't just "fix" the GPL. For one thing,
>adding explicit clauses for various applications would be the road to
>madness - where do you stop? There's also the issue that while some font
>authors may not have known about this restriction, others may have - and
>the FSF would be justifiably unwilling to wipe out their licensing
>intent with a revision of the license.
>
>On the flip side, I rather doubt even the FSF are willing to explicitly
>"clarify" that "all your documents are belong to us." (sorry!). Thus we
>find ourselves the present situation, which as alluded to by Marvin may
>well be an intentional lack of clarity.

I understand. We need to be cautious and warn people in a practical 
way so they know what's involved. It's up to them, then, to decide 
which way to go. One of my concerns is always to have more people use 
Scribus. If we put fonts on the website and people simply grab them 
like I did (and like lots of people do, I hope) and we also put a 
general warning about fonts and licencing issues, I think this can 
cause (some) people to step back. I don't want to see it bigger an 
issue than it is ... but it's certainly something the Team will want 
to address with lots of attention.

I guess we won't know the end of this in a long time.

Louis

>
>--
>Craig Ringer
>
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