Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add ttf-symbola.

[Ian Denhardt]

Quoting Eric Bavier (2014-10-23 10:14:02)
> 
> Andreas Enge writes:
> 
> > On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 08:51:04PM +0400, Alex Kost wrote:
> >> «In lieu of a licence: Fonts in this site are offered free for any use;
> >> they may be opened, edited, modified, regenerated, posted, packaged and
> >> redistributed.»
> >> Is it OK to use "fsf-free" for this package?
> >
> > To me, this sounds like "public-domain".
> 
> I was thinking the same.

To me this sounds like "author does not understand licensing/copyright."
It's pretty obvious the intent is some kind of simple permissive thing
(whether that's a license or public domain), but it's not clear to me
how much legal ambiguity there is. IANAL, but for certain entities, the
ambiguity can be a problem (suppose, for example, you're a designer
wanting to use this font for something, but you work somewhere with a
strict legal department that doesn't think this qualifies as a license -
you may be out of luck).

You run into issues around certain packages, like sqlite-docs, where
they end up being technically non-free because the developers decide
"copyright is silly, I'm not going to deal with this." I sympathize,
but...

We ought to be careful about this one - maybe ask someone at the FSF
about whether this meets their standards, and if not maybe ask the
developer if they can put something less ambiguous on it.

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