RE: [XaraXtreme-dev] Substituted fonts and Bug 1057

[Alex Bligh <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles,

--On 22 May 2006 14:26 +0100 Charles Moir <CharlesM@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> That license would appear to be very broad and would appear to let us
> provide the fonts (as long as it's not for any commercial product). To
> quote from the MS Website:

That wasn't the way I read it it. Quite the opposite.

Firstly, it will clearly prevent you from providing the fonts if you are
ever planning to provide a commercial version of LX (on whatever platform)
even if that is just a version on CD with support, as the fonts "enhance"
it. The end of EULA clause 1 specifically prohibits this.

Secondly, you must supply the fonts with their original filenames. That
means you cannot (for instance) include them supplied within a .deb
or .rpm; it also means we can't put them in the installer (they would
be supplied in a bundle). The alteration clause on derivative works
would appear to agree with their own FAQ (makes a change) in that
creating a something containing the fonts (unaltered) is also not
permitted, /irrespective/ of whether or not it is for profit. Further
the "for profit" would apply to the distribution vendors as well,
so even if Xara was not distributing for profit, this would prohibit
(say) Redhat distributing Xara if it depended on getting these fonts.

Thirdly, (EULA Grant clause 1), your license to reproduce and distribute
is contingent about it being a "true and complete copy including all
copyright and trademark notices". That is in essence GPL incompatible,
and would prevent any software relying on it getting into any Linux
distribution I should think. Ditto the restriction on alteration in
para 2 blob 2.

Having LX rely on a Microsoft EULA would be (in my opinion) singularly
inadvisable.

So not only can Xara not distribute them, but the users can't download
them themselves (as MS have removed them).

I think we should avoid relying on these fonts at all. My view is that
the LX default templates should use Nimbus (or something else commonly
installed with the same metrics) and we should ensure that on MS this
(as expected) substitutes to give Arial. We can also supply MS users
with Nimbus etc. in TTF format for free as a download. Heh, you could
even charge them for it Charles....

This would also be a neat fix to the most of Bug #1057 without requiring
new data structures (Martin's problem) or extensive combo box work (my
problem).

It would be interesting to hear from Joachim or another package maintainer
re their views on dependency on MS EULAs. I know that the Debian/Ubuntu
package (which was in contrib, not in the main release) which purported
to include these fonts didn't - it actually was a small program which
pulled them down for the end user from Microsoft's web site (and hence
no longer works) - presumably for precisely this reason.

Alex