Adding Accufonts to the update stream

Colin Putney cputney at whistler.com
Mon Feb 24 18:18:05 UTC 2003


On Monday, February 24, 2003, at 02:58  AM, Cees de Groot wrote:

> That's the biggest issue I have with the license. It's extremely vague 
> -
> what is a 'derivative software product'. And what if I want to use them
> for something that does not fit that term?
>
> Helvetica has no usage restriction and no 'advertising clause'.
> Therefore, I'm in favor of using that (and Times, Courier to complete
> the set of basic glyphs, of course).

I'm liking the idea of going with the basic trio of Times, Helvetica 
and Courier from X11. These are nice looking fonts, familiar to 
everyone, the very prototypes for serif, sans-serif and monospace type. 
They can be the fonts provided in the base image, with packages for 
additional fonts, bit from Apple, the Accufolks, the Gnome project or 
whatever.

It seems to me that we have two needs here. In the short term, we need 
an image we can take to Apple in support of our plea for relicensing. I 
think the X fonts will work fine here, since we don't actually have to 
have the new image deployed in order to negotiate with Apple. Cees has 
already done the work, and initiated a conversation with Apple, so 
let's continue down that road.

If all goes well, some future version of Squeak will be distributed 
with a new license, but without the Apple fonts. At that point we need 
to consider the long term. Again, I think the X fonts would be a good 
choice, since the license is both well-defined and unrestrictive. 
Moving to some standard 8-bit encoding and tweaking the VMs is also a 
good idea in the long run, and can happen in step with relicensing an a 
font switch.

In short, this isn't a change that can happen instantly since there are 
several related factors involved. But that need not prevent us from 
tackling the legal issues with Apple.

Cheers,

Colin

Colin Putney
Whistler.com



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