[Scribus] font licence

[Marvin Dickens]

On Sunday 17 April 2005 04:11 pm, Andreas Vox wrote:
> Hi,
>
> just to add my 2cents worth:
>
> a) Apple/Adobe also call fonts "font programs", so that should apply
> b) GPL is a *copyright* licence and AFAIK does not control internal use
> or programs which are linked by the enduser to their own copy of the
> GPL'd code.
> c) GPL would apply to documents using GPL'd fonts only if one
> considered the document 'linked" with the font program.
>
> With that said, my opinion is that embedded fonts might make a document
> a derivative work.
> If distributed it would have to be GPL'd.
> If fonts are not embedded, I would not consider it linked, since usual
> font substitution might apply.
> For fonts *subsetted* in Scribus it might be even more subtle, since
> Scribus "executes" the font program to obtain a list of coordinates.
> These coordinates are therefore the output of the font program and may
> be embedded as Scribus does.
>
> Of course one can still discuss if a font is really a program, or if a
> document can be viewed as a program. I could understand if one said PS
> files are programs, but I have my doubts with PDF files...
>
> Still, a nice mess.

IMO, you are absolutely correct in all of your statements with the exception 
of PDF files. If something is going to be put into the wiki regarding this 
mess, I think that perhaps your assessment should be included.

In reality, is not PDF an extension of the Post script language? Even if it's 
not, a PDF reader does contain an interpeter that processes the document.
If you look at the code included with Linux that interpets PDF's (Not the 
abobe reader, but ghostscript) it sure looks to me as if the PDF file is 
behaving as a program. Even if it's not, the licensing thing still applied if 
you embed fonts into a PDF document...


Regards

Marvin