Bug 5553

Summary:	mkcfm is really hideously non-free and CIDFonts are obsolete
Product:	xorg	Reporter:	Daniel Stone <daniel>
Component:	App/other	Assignee:	Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	high	CC:	dberkholz, jch, mfabian, sndirsch
Version:	unspecified	Keywords:	licence
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Daniel Stone 2006-01-09 12:35:02 UTC

mkcfm's only statement of license is:
 * The contents of this file are subject to the CID Font Code Public Licence
 * Version 1.0 (the "License"). You may not use this file except in compliance
 * with the Licence. You may obtain a copy of the License at Silicon Graphics,
 * Inc., attn: Legal Services, 2011 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, CA
 * 94043 or at http://www.sgi.com/software/opensource/cid/license.html.

guess which URL on sgi.com 404s.  i dare you.

so let's pretend that instead of the sgi.com URL, they meant the one on
xfree86.org, or in doc/, or whereever.

2. License Terms. All distribution of the Subject Software must be made subject
to the terms of this License. A copy of this License and the Required Notice
must be included in any documentation for Subject Software where Recipient's
rights relating to Subject Software and/or any Accompanying Technology are
described. Distributions of Subject Software in source code form must also
include the Required Notice in every file distributed. In addition, a ReadMe
file entitled "Important Legal Notice" must be distributed with each
distribution of one or more files that incorporate Subject Software. That file
must be included with distributions made in both source code and executable
form. A copy of the License and the Required Notice must be included in that
file. Recipient may distribute Accompanying Technology under a license of
Recipient's choice, which may contain terms different from this License,
provided that (i) Recipient is in compliance with the terms of this License,
(ii) such other license terms do not modify or supersede the terms of this
License as applicable to the Subject Software, (iii) Recipient hereby
indemnifies SGI for any liability incurred by SGI as a result of the
distribution of Accompanying Technology or the use of other license terms.

i don't think anyone ever can even pretend to possibly comply to these terms. 
'important legal notice'??

Comment 1 Daniel Stone 2006-11-09 01:39:13 UTC

this also applies to the cid code in lib/libxfont, which made my lawyer at work
unhappy enough to make me stop shipping it.

i propose we remove it for 7.3.

Comment 2 Stefan Dirsch 2006-11-09 02:07:07 UTC

I can't comment on the legal issue, but from a technical perspective CID font 
rendering is currently broken anyway (most likely since several releases). See 
Novell Bugzilla #209394. I think the last time it worked was XFree86 4.4.0 RC2 
or something like that. And even before at most times it didn't work. Maybe 
Mike wants to comment on the importance of CID font rendering. SUSE/Novell is 
still shipping CID-keyed fonts.

Comment 3 Mike FABIAN 2006-11-09 03:25:00 UTC

We are still shipping CID-keyed fonts but mainly because they
are sometimes useful for printing CJK texts with Ghostscript.

I don't think the rendering of CID-keyed fonts in the X11 core font
system is very important. It is ugly and slow and was often even
broken. As Stefan already wrote, it is broken again in
the current version of the Xorg source code.

If CID-keyed fonts could be made to work with freetype this would
be much more interesting because then they could be used with
client side font rendering. But rendering CID-keyed fonts with
the X11 core font system is not very useful.

Comment 4 Juliusz Chroboczek 2006-11-14 09:40:11 UTC

I'm strongly in favour of this removal, as stated on

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=364965

In short

  - CIDFonts are obsolete, and have been so for a decade or so;
  - the CIDFont code is something none of us understands and none of
    us wants to maintain;
  - there are Free utilities (notably fontforge) that perform a lossless
    conversion from the CIDFont format to the OpenType/CFF format, which is
    something that we do understand.

                                              Juliusz

Comment 5 Daniel Stone 2006-11-30 14:40:59 UTC

removed, with glee.

libxfont 1.2.4
xorg-server 1.1.99.903
mkcfm deprecated

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