Re: gEDA-user: gEDA, where are the loadable examples?

[marvindickens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Sunday 13 March 2005 19:56, Al Davis wrote:

> Stuart may want to charge for his CD.  Maybe somebody will make
> a Knoppix CD, and sell copies of it.  The "No Fee License"
> makes that illegal.  



Stuart or anyone else is free to distribute his symbols and footprints under 
any license he sees fit to use. Stuart (Or anyone else) is free to 
simultaneously distribute symbols and footprints that he owns the copyright 
to under multiple licenses if he chooses to do so. In fact, had those users
who keep talking about selling their symbols and footprints done so by now,
this issue would probably have taken care of itself. But, they didn't for 
whatever reason.

> This means that if I want to sell such a 
> CD, I must remove all symbols with that license.
> The impact goes far beyond that.  For example, Debian has gEDA
> and lots of other stuff in its electronics section.  Debian
> would no longer be able to include gEDA.
>
> To simply distribute together, as on the same CD, the
> requirement is more relaxed, but still the "No Fee License"
> doesn't qualify.  Any license approved by the Open Source
> Initiative (http://www.opensource.org) would qualify.  There
> are too many licenses already.  Please don't invent another
> one.

If you know of a license at opensource.org that covers this issue,
please point it out to me because I couldn't find it. In fact, if you know
of any license that addresses this issue, please point it out to me. Also a 
friend of mine who is a lawyer also looked at opensource.org. He too, 
concluded that there are no licenses that address the usage of fonts, symbols 
or footprints. In fact, licensing issues extremely similar to this one have 
been discussed on mailing lists at opencores.org. Users and developers on 
those lists determined that there are no appropriate licenses that deal with 
this issue.

Everyday, people use Bitstream fonts in Linux. They are copyrighted and owned
by Bitstream. Yet, they are included in just about every linux distribution. 
They are free for download from apt and rpm repositories. However, they are 
not gpl'ed. The same is true for MS core web fonts, SGI fonts, Adobe fonts, 
Ghostscript fonts from Aladdin and a large portion of the Laribie fonts. All 
of these fonts are being shipped with distributions including RedHat Fedora 
Core , Suse , Mandrake, Gentoo, Yellow Dog, Turbo Linux, Libranet and 
Conectiva and yet, they are not gpl'ed.  Without these fonts there
would be no linux desktop or office applications for private use. 

It seems to me that this is an issue of practicality - Politics do not apply. 
If some members of this community have decided not to participate with
providing a reasonable set of core symbols and footprints for use without fee, 
it's OK with me. Even so, I intend to do everything that I can to ensure that 
really free symbols and footprints are available for use with these tools. It 
is the only way I know of to make the suite of tools viable. Further, I am 
not the only one. I have already received emails from others on this list who 
have already donated footprints and symbols and they have feeling similar to 
mine regarding this issue. During the next week, I will be opening the 
repositories for users to download footprints and symbols.


Best regards

Marvin