[tex-live] EC license

[Robin Fairbairns]

Alexander Cherepanov <cherepan at mccme.ru> wrote:

> While looking into licensing of LH fonts I stumbled upon a license for 
> EC fonts parts of which are included in LH. copyrite.txt in the
> distribution of EC fonts contain a custom license similar in spirit to 
> LPPL but not equivalent to it (it predates LPPL).

similar in spirit to the licence quoted for latex at the time the ec
fonts were finally delivered -- a licence spec which owes a lot to don.

> One of the obnoxious 
> clauses (but not the only one) is a restriction for renaming:
> 
>  * The names of the modified fonts must not start with the two letters
>    `ec' or `tc'.
> 
> It's broader than that of ukhyphen.tex which was removed because of 
> it, right? (Topic about ukhyphen.tex :
> http://www.tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2006-May/thread.html#10224 .)
> 
> OTOH rsync://rsync.tex.ac.uk/CTANcatalogue/entries/e/ec.xml contains:
> 
>   <license type='lppl'/>

(on the whole, it would have been better if you hadn't mentioned that
rsync access to repository on an open archived list.  i have suppressed
it.)

> This looks like an error.

though the file has me as its most recent editor, i can see no entry in
the svn log that says i actually gave it that licence.  since i don't
mention the readme in the catalogue entry, i suspect i've never actually
read it before this evening :-( (you'll note that there's no mention of
the readme in the repository -- you can still see that through html
translations.)

> And http://wiki.debian.org/ProblematicCtanPackages lists it among "Less 
> serious problems":
> 
>   EC fonts: strange license wording, asked Karl Berry to contact Jörg
>   Knappen, the author
> 
> Was there any progress on the issue?

note that joerg's fc fonts (latin-alike alphabets for african languages)
are gpl2.  this is straightforward, whereas what the readme in ec says
doesn't feel coherent ... sort of trying to sound strict without quite
thinking it all through from the start.

robin