Hi.

I was dutifully converting my font packages to the new guidelines, when I ran into a possible legal issue.

For the sake of argument, let us assume a font licensed under OFL, called Mardana. The upstream tarball has two families inside, Mardana Sans and Mardana Serif, in TTF format. The text of the OFL license is not included in the TTFs themselves, but in a separate text file in the tarball. Actually, let's assume the TTFs themselves don't have any copyright or licensing metadata.

According to the new font packaging guidelines, there would be three packages, mardana-fonts-common, mardana-serif-fonts, and mardana-sans-fonts. All documentation related files will be in *-common, and all the actual TTFs would be in *-sans-* and *-serif-*.

So, someone finds about the fonts, wants to use them on Windows, searches for them, and finds our binary RPM for Mardana Sans, and downloads it. She then opens it with some tool and installs it on her machine.

But that's a license violation by us:

"2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled, redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user."

But we are not providing any copyright notice or license in our binary RPM, that is supposedly the "software" that that Font Software is bundled with. All we say, is two pointers: "OFL" in the RPM license tag, and "mardana-fonts-common" in the requires tag.

Of course, if the user really wants to, she can investigate the binary RPM, and find pointers to the actual license, and go and find the license. But we would not be redistributing the license with "each copy".

Please enlighten me.

Roozbeh