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

[Shawn Landden]

On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 9:28 PM, 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.
> 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+.
The font is needed in the initramfs
>
> Zbyszek
>
> [1] http://packages.debian.org/sid/all/unifont/filelist
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