Bug 487510
| Summary: | Licensing issue of ghostscript CMap files | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Fedora] Fedora | Reporter: | Peter Backes <rtc> |
| Component: | ghostscript | Assignee: | Tim Waugh <twaugh> |
| Status: | CLOSED RAWHIDE | QA Contact: | Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa> |
| Severity: | medium | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | low | ||
| Version: | 10 | CC: | jonstanley, rdieter, tcallawa, twaugh |
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | All | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | 2009-07-30 12:52:55 UTC | Type: | --- |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
| Bug Depends On: | 507675 | ||
| Bug Blocks: | |||
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Description
Peter Backes
2009-02-26 13:49:04 UTC
Adding dep on poppler-data, as that's essentially the same stuff at issue here. I'll echo what I just commented in the poppler-data review: The more I think about it, the more black and white it is ... this content can't possibly be acceptable for fedora. /me removes foot from mouth, Re-reading, https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Content_Licenses "... The one exception is that we permit content (but only content) which restricts modification as long as that is the only restriction." I understand "content" as some kind of text or image. The files in question rather look like "data," not "content". Better than Fedora's criterion of "content" is the distinction of RMS between functional works and things like works of opinion. RMS says that functional works must be free, while it is sufficient for works of opinion to be shareable (a weaker criterion). As I see it, these CMap file are clearly functional, as they seem to do some mapping. Having said that, the copyright claim seems bogus to me, as this is rather a database without any creativity involved and so it shouldn't be eligible for copyright ... I'm going to defer this decision to FESCo, specifically: "Are the CMap files considered as code or content?" If they're code, they need to be removed (as the license is non-free), but I am unaware of any free-licensed CMap files. These CMap files are coded to Adobe's CMap file specification: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/font/pdfs/5014.CIDFont_Spec.pdf That gives the definition of a CMap as: "The CMap, or character code map, maps character codes to glyph selectors." As the CMap file is simply a "mapping" of these character codes for the various encodings, I suspect that it is probably true that any attempt to replace the Adobe CMap files would result in functionally identical postscript. This is right on the line of whether it is code or content. It is clearly written in postscript (an machine language), but these CMap files are not strictly meant to be executed, rather, they provide a strict set of character mappings for font encodings. If I had a vote (which, technically, I don't), I would say that this is barely considered as content. Opened a ticket with FESCo: https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/177 Thanks! This is now on the FESCo agenda, the meeting discussing it will be this Friday (7/10) at 17:00UTC (1PM EDT) in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net FESCo decided that the CMap files are content. Please add "Redistributable, no modification permitted" to the License tag for any package that has these Adobe CMap files (ghostscript, poppler-data). Lifting FE-Legal, but leaving this bug open until the license tags are updated in Rawhide. License updated in rawhide. |