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

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

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.
FontException allows embedding in "documents", so it doesn't apply.
It would be possible have some sources which are GPLv2+ only, but I
think we want to avoid such complications.

Also, if the font was embedded in systemd, distributions would then
remove it in order to replace is with the system version. So I think
that including the font sources is pointless... Debian has it packaged [1],
but an old version, I'm not sure if there have been recent updates, and
possibly in the wrong format. Fedora doesn't seem to have it yet.
But adding fonts is easy, I'd do the Fedora package myself, and other
distributions could surely add/update it.

So if it is acceptable for systemd-gfx *binary* to be GPLv2+ licensed,
we could use the system unifont.hex file at build time, and actually
link it into the binary. I propose that we try to go this way.

Or we could have the package also contain the converted font in appropriate
format, and mmap it at runtime. But this is more complex, and doesn't actually
avoid the licensing issue, since the font would still be GPLv2+.

Zbyszek

[1] http://packages.debian.org/sid/all/unifont/filelist