This is very helpful Ian and I really do appreciate your feedback. I think that we are in agreement on our end that elimination of the reserved font name will be the best approach for all involved.
This will likely come along with licensing of all changes that we have made to the upstream source under a MIT license. How to approach the license for our changes remains under discussion by our project authors and the community around the project but this is the direction that we are leaning. This means that you can perform source and post-compilation modifications on the fonts derived from our released source and maintain the name Hack on these fonts. Ultimately, we want the fonts to be as free as possible given the upstream licensing restrictions that are in place and the pros of the RFN removal move for us seem to outweigh the cons. A large part of our current move to release the source as UFO only with only free OS build tools is to encourage its use as an upstream for modifications and new derivatives. A number of authors have expressed an interest in using “Hack” in the name of their derivative projects, something that is not permitted under the current license (including for the authors of Hack should we choose to release a derivative!). The move is, I think, a good one for the project and the Debian community has been a large part of the push for us to better understand these licensing issues and take action. Thanks to all in this thread for your feedback and assistance. Your time is greatly appreciated! Thanks again, Chris On Aug 30, 2017, 10:33 AM -0400, wrote: > > From Debian's point of view, the licence you provide is adequate for > us to be able to include the fonts in Debian. However, the reserved > font name restriction would almost certainly mean that we would have > to rename the fonts. > > Debian has a long history of dealing with upstreams who restrict the > ability of Debian to distribute a modified version under the usual > name. For example, for many years, Debian's Firefox package was > called `iceweasel' (and all the Firefox branding was removed), because > the Mozilla Foundation (who own the trademark "Firefox") insisted on > prior approval of all changes. > > Debian is not likely to accept a restriction on modifying glyphs. We > consider that Debian (and its downstreams and users) must be free to > make changes - even changes that upstreams disapprove of. For fonts, > the need to change glyphs is not theoretical: when I was an Ubuntu > developer I personally modified a font in order to correct an > erroneous glyph in some Georgian character, in response to a bug > report from a user.) > > So, if you would like Debian to distribute your fonts under names > which advertise your project as the origin, then you should grant > Debian permission to do so. > > I hope this has been a useful perspective. > > Regards, > Ian. > > NB: I am not the person in Debian who makes these decisions. But I > think the views I have attributed above to the project as a whole will > be very uncontroversial.
