[cairo] Font licenses and embedding

[Bill Spitzak]

You can't "inadvertantly GPL your document". What you could do is 
violate the copyright on the font. You may have to remove it from future 
distributions, and you could get sued for monetary damages.

For the GPL this falls under the "agglomeration" clause. And I think 
providing the "source" of the font, rather than only the "compiled" 
images of the letters, seems much more in spirit of the GPL. Therefore 
such a document is *more* in agreement with the GPL than a printed page, 
and everybody agrees the printed page is ok, so therefore this must be 
ok as well.

For commercial fonts it still seems that the usability of the font is 
very much restricted without the ability to copy it into a document. I 
would think the copyright restrictions would be that a person getting 
your document is not allowed to copy the font out of it and use it in 
their own documents.

Jon Smirl wrote:
> The issue of font licenses and font embedding has come up on the xorg
> list. How is this handled with the PS/PDF backend for Cairo? I may
> have GPL or commercial fonts on my system, how are the licenses dealt
> with when the font gets embedded into the PS file?
>  
> There needs to be some mechanism for the user to know what is going on
> with the licenses and font embedding. You don' t want to accidentally
> post a commercial font to the Internet or inadvertently GPL your
> document.
>