GPL font exception: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:06, 23 October 2011

Revision as of 17:08, 23 October 2011

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The font exception was authored in April 2005 by David "Novalis" Turner, a [[Free Software Foundation]] GPL compliance engineer. As he explains, "The situation we were considering was one where a font was embedded in a document (rather than merely referenced). Embedding allows a document to be viewed as the author intended it even on machines that don't have that font installed. So, the document (a copyrighted work) would be derived from the font program (another work). The text of the document, of course, would be unrestricted when distributed without the font."<ref>First published on the Scribus discussion list by Louis Desjardins with the permission of David Turner, 2005-04-20 "[Scribus] Response from the FSF about GPL fonts" http://lists.scribus.info/pipermail/scribus/2005-April/018877.html (accessed 2011-10-22)</ref><ref>From "Font Licensing" by novalis (David Turner), published 2005-04-25 (modified 2010-05-17) http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050425novalis (accessed 2011-10-22)</ref>

To be in compliance with the GPL, FedoraRedhat's Redhat[[Fedora (operating system)|Fedora Linux]] project included the font exception with the license for its Liberation Font package, albeit with additional restrictions in 2007.<ref>See "Licensing:LiberationFontLicense" http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/LiberationFontLicense (accessed 2011-10-22)</ref> These restrictions prompted further discussion among the Debian GNU/Linux distribution's community members concerning the GPL+FE.<ref>See "License question: GPL+Exception" by Alan Baghumian 2007-05-12 http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg36584.html (accessed 2011-10-22).</ref> This attention prompted other distributions to follow suit and examine and edit the licenses of digital fonts in their distributions.<ref>See "The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing" in Nathan Willis 2010-10-13 in LWN: http://lwn.net/Articles/409813/ (accessed 2011-10-22)</ref>

== Usage ==