[Bf-committers] Embedded Bfont violates GPL

IRIE Shinsuke irieshinsuke at yahoo.co.jp
Wed Jul 17 17:19:40 CEST 2013


Hi,

Blender's default font (Bfont = DejaVu Sans fonts) is embedded
in the program binary, so the Bfont is distributed under GPL.
However, this GPLed DejaVu fonts still inherit the following
hateful restrictions:

- The Font Software may be modified, altered, or added to, and
  in particular the designs of glyphs or characters in the Fonts
  may be modified and additional glyphs or characters may be
  added to the Fonts, only if the fonts are renamed to names not
  containing either the words "Bitstream" or the word "Vera".

- The Font Software may be modified, altered, or added to, and
  in particular the designs of glyphs or characters in the Fonts
  may be modified and additional glyphs or characters may be
  added to the Fonts, only if the fonts are renamed to names not
  containing either the words "Tavmjong Bah" or the word "Arev".

- The Font Software may be sold as part of a larger software
  package but no copy of one or more of the Font Software
  typefaces may be sold by itself.

Such "further restrictions" apparently violate the GPL.

To avoid the license violation, Blender has to drop the Bitstream
Vera derivative fonts (Bfont + Bmonofont) or load these fonts from
separate font files as runtime data on startup.  The international
fonts don't cause the problem because they are distributed as
separate font files in 2.6x/datafiles/fonts/ directory.

Thanks

-- 
IRIE Shinsuke


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