[systemd-devel] [RFC 05/12] gfx: add sd-gfx library with unifont section

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 01:55:00AM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Sun, 01.12.13 06:28, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek (zbyszek at in.waw.pl) wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 07:48:40PM +0100, David Herrmann wrote:
> > > As a first step, we add the required header+build-chain and add the
> > > font-handling. To avoid heavy font-pipelines in systemd, we only provide
> > > a statically-sized fallback-font based on GNU-Unifont.
> > Hi David,
> > I don't think that GNU-Unifont is licensed in a way that allows it to
> > be embedded in systemd. Systemd is LGPLv2+, while Unifont is GPLv2+ +
> > FontException.
> 
> I don't think this is really a problem, is it? LGPL2+ is after all
> compatible wit GPL2+. When you link stuff that is LGPL2+ with stuff that
> is GPL2+ you effectively just "downgrade" LGPL2+ to GPL2+, and get a
> result that effectively should be treated as GPL2+ altogether.
> 
> Now, what matters for us is that all our APIs and our sources stay
> LGPL2+, so that we can freely copy/paste code around and library users
> can use the stuff with little restrictions. However, if systemd-consoled
> at runtime is downgraded to GPL2+, then that should not really affect
> anybody... I mean, if somebody wanted to link non-free code into
> consoled, then we'd have a problem, but nobody does that and consoled is
> not a program where that's even something to think off.
> 
> I'd be fine to do with unifont what we do with the pci/usb-db, and ship
> it in the sources, and provide an easy way to update it from upstream
> (via a make target).
All this is to some extent true, even if mixing LGPL and GPL code makes
things more complicated for downstreams.

Above notwithstanding, the first thing that Fedora and Debian are going
to do is to rip out our version and replace it with a distribution wide
copy. I'd prefer to make things easier and keep unifont fully external.

Zbyszek