Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization [LWN.net]

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 19, 2012 21:18 UTC (Tue) by n8willis (editor, #43041)
In reply to: Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization by rfontana
Parent article: Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

My research said that the original (alpha? beta? unnumbered?) downloads circa May '07 did not have the custom exceptions, only the standard GPL-font-embedding-exception, as it says here: http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.press.redhat.com%2F2007%2F05%2F09%2Fliberation-fonts%2F&date=2008-01-17 and that the updated license was added subsequently.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that that was intentional (a la this other licensing bug from Aug 2007: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=250753). Unfortunately, the tarballs for the oldest releases here: https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liberation-fonts/ are timestamped from 2010, so that may be hard to prove conclusively, modulo time travel.

Nate

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Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 19, 2012 22:04 UTC (Tue) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

> My research said that the original (alpha? beta? unnumbered?)
> downloads circa May '07 did not have the custom exceptions, only the
> standard GPL-font-embedding-exception, as it says here:
> http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pre...
> and that the updated license was added subsequently.

Ah, an understandable confusion. Mark Webbink described the whole
shebang as "GPLv2 + exception", which is not how I (who was not at Red
Hat at that time) would have described it. Indeed, if you look at the
text of the Liberation Fonts license you will see that both the
font-embedding exception and the anti-Tivoization provision are
described as "exceptions"
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:LiberationFontLi...

Yet this is not a standard use of "exception" in the GPL
context. Customarily, or in accordance with FSF practice at least, a
GPL "exception" is a grant of additional permission. So the
font-embedding exception is an exception, but the so-called
anti-Tivoization provision is not a true exception, but is, rather, an
imposition of an additional restriction. It is similar to, though
broader and less specific than, the User Products provision in GPLv3.

It is, in fact, for that reason that I urged Fedora to call the
Liberation Fonts license the Liberation Fonts license (rather than
describe it as "GPLv2 + exception" which in Fedora packaging metadata
parlance means GPLv2 plus additional permission).