Talk:Liberation fonts

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[edit] GPL exceptions

From the article:

Adoption of the fonts has been hampered[1][2] by the following clause in its license:

(b)As a further exception, any distribution of the object code of the Software in a physical product must provide you the right to access and modify the source code for the Software and to reinstall that modified version of the Software in object code form on the same physical product on which you received it.

This renders the fonts non-distributable because the GPL does not permit additional restrictions to be placed upon a work.

This is nonsense. These are exceptions to the GPL, that is, amendments that make this license incompatible with the standard GPL. The GPL's ban on further restriction is what prompted the amendment in the first place. The license that this font package carries is _not_ the standard GPL, but a variation with caveats that trump the main text. This modified GPL contains an exception to the "no additional restrictions" clause, so saying that it "violates" the GPL is silly because it's not the GPL, it's a modified GPL that is incompatible with the standard. Cherry Cotton 06:24, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Licensing controversy deleted.

I've deleted the entire licensing controversy section. There were no citations and it seemed just silly. Absent a citation showing controversy, the bit about the misunderstanding of the exemption is silly. Lots of people misunderstand lots of things about lots of legal documents; only mainstream misunderstandings are noteworthy. As for the bit about the source code, that's just weird. Plenty of font editors never work with a "textual description." So absent citations backing up these unusual additions, I'm deleting tem. — Alan De Smet | Talk 23:17, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm re-adding it, with citations. It's not about the exception b) which makes the license merely GPL-incompatible but otherwise fine, it's about the rename clause (the "Intellectual Property Rights" section). KiloByte 08:58, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I've deleted most of it again. I dramatically rewrote the first bit to match what can be gleamed from the provided citation. Ultimately, is a discussion by some random people involved in Debian really noteworthy? If some of these people were noteworthy in and of themselves for their legal opinions, it might be, but I'm planning on deleting it again soon. As for the bit about the additional trademark restriction is simply wrong. Per the GPL, "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms... Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks;...." Absent someone noteworthy putting forth a claim that this is a problem (and that claim being cited in this article), there is no reason to includ this. The section on the release of source is similarlly completely uncited. — Alan De Smet | Talk 23:16, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
My 2 cents: I don't think the debian-legal discussion is notable enough to include in the article. Now, if someone from the FSF, such as RMS, said "The Liberation font license is not valid", or if the FSF's legal counsel said the same thing, it would be notable. Samboy 19:06, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
You mean where RMS says as much at [1]? Yrro (talk) 23:52, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
I don't see any reference to the Liberation fonts or license in that thread. I instead see a discussion of licensing of "csplain", which appears to be part of a TeX distribution. We shouldn't go putting words in his mouth based on extrapolation. — Alan De Smet | Talk 01:26, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What are the units of the statistics?

In the Statistics section, there are big tables of numbers, but little clue as to what those numbers mean. Please document the units of those numbers. 75.185.66.16 17:57, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

The statistics and other data are outdated now that the final release has been made. I also feel they don't contribute anything to the article and actually make it unreadable to non-typographers. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a font foundry fan site. --KJRehberg (talk) 14:26, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bugzilla entry for RHEL 5.1 includes the new fonts

The new version of Liberation is on Red Hat's Bugzilla server. It was just released. The files are dated 2007-12-18. seee https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427791 . --KJRehberg (talk) 20:34, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

The download page now features the newest version of the fonts. I have updated the article accordingly and added a note that the Fedora 9 version of the fonts is even newer. --KJRehberg (talk) 14:24, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Liberation Font samples' example text

About the example images: The line "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" contains no use of the letter 's'. Was this intentional? I believe the standard line uses "jumps" instead of "jumped". QTachyon (talk) 03:42, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Nope, just a screw up. I tried to mimic existing samples I found elsewhere in Wikipedia. I don't remember which ones specifically. They probably got it right and I got it wrong. Sorry. — Alan De Smet | Talk 04:12, 23 March 2008 (UTC)