Licensing confusion

[apodtele]

This mirror offers 3 licenses to choose from.
That mirror offers a single license.

I think there must an agreement about licensing. @chris-liddell @twardoch ?

What's the path forward for the reported issues if Monotype is not interested?

[chris-liddell]

There's no confusion here. URW++ contributed the fonts to the Ghostscript project under the GPL and agreed to us updating first to GPLv3 then to AGPLv3 - so that's the license we redistribute with. If URW++ released the fonts under other licenses (which it appears they did), that is/was their prerogative, but they never informed us, not asked us to include those other licenses. If we get somewhere with Monotype (see below) we'll ask them to clarify the license status.

As for a route forward: we (Artifex) are still in (very, very slow!) discussions with Monotype to clarify the situation. If Monotype decide to wash their hands of the AGPL fonts, then we (Artifex) will take on some maintenance - generally, we'll do "structural" work on the font files, but we won't take on any design changes/updates/additions. We may accept community contributions for design changes, but we'll be strict about them - our last experience with that was not good.

Chris

[apodtele]

If Adam and you have different communication lines with URW+ and possibly Monotype, you might have obtained different licensing options indeed. I just want to increase the likelihood of fixing those bugs by engaging both communication lines and relying on your professionalism and experience.

Adam, please let me know if you would like me to file those bugs here. That is confusing (or inconvenient) task for me, as long as it helps.

[bgermann]

@twardoch You should check if the NimbusSans-BoldOblique, NimbusSans-Oblique, and NimbusSansNarrow-BdOblique were actually released under the triple license. They were renamed at some point but are untouched in this repository since 79bcdfb which still had a single AGPL license file.

[bgermann]

The original repo said in its README.md: "The earlier versions distributed with Ghostscript 4.00 and on CTAN are now available under the same terms as version 2.0 as defined above."

So, this should be fine. But please consider removing the fonts with the old name as they are still in the older version and this is confusing as well.

[bgermann]

@chris-liddell mupdf actually uses the fonts under OFL, so maybe it is time to unify their use at Artifex?