Re: [Devel] Apple Licenses Question

[Nathan Hurst]

On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Antoine Leca wrote:

> <ADVOCATE OF DEVIL>
> However, there is a big hindrance behind this whole idea: the resulting
> fonts can _only_ be handled by Freetype, or in other words cannot be used
> on Windows and MacOS; as a result, the "market" for the building of such
> fonts will be extremely narrow, which in turn mean that almost nobody
> except a handful of fanatics (no pun intended) will take the care of
> producing good-quality "TuxType" fonts.
> </ADVOCATE>

<DEVIL HIMSELF :>
Or we could provide a patch in a free country like Russia where the 
patents don't apply and let people download that if they want the higher
quality.  Debian provides a non-us site for people to get code that would
be illegal in the .us, or illegal for someone outside the .us to download
from within the .us.  The patented code is in this category - as far as I
understand it is only significant in a few countries: so why should
everyone else miss out?  It is also not illegal for a person to own a
patented device, only for them to sell or reproduce it, so it may even
be possible for people in the .us to use the software, just not move it
around or contribute. </D>

njh