contributing new font package for xorg

[Jesse Barnes]

On Wednesday, August 10, 2005 3:11 pm, Ely Levy wrote:
> GPLing fonts means that every document that puts the fonts inside it
> would be GPLed as well (certain pdfs some level of ps and other kind
> of docs do that). that can cause major legal issues with articals or
> books someone decide to sell in pdf format.
> Ironicly enough it also mean that GFDL licensed doc using GPL fonts
> would break both GPL and GFDL (fun no?:)

This could easily turn into a licensing war, but do you have any 
precedent or strong legal basis for that statement?

Just because a document uses a certain font doesn't mean it's a 
"derivative work" of that font, since the font is easily changeable 
without affecting the content of the document (in my very unlawyerly 
opinion).  I definitely don't consider this email to be a derivative 
work of the Monospace font that came with my Fedora installation, even 
if I attach it to the mail so you can see it as I composed it.

For fonts it seems like the only real derivative work would be a new 
font that uses bits from an old font...

Jesse