xero / figlet-fonts

my collection of figlet / toilet ascii art fonts

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A license?

azmeuk opened this issue · comments

Hi. Thank you for sharing those fonts.
Would you consider putting a license to this repository? Maybe a license debian compatible so maybe those fonts could be shipped on the next debian?

edit: I just submitted a debian bug report : https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=900052

Might be hard to do since he would need to track down a lot of the original authors of the fonts.

But as a start - I'm Christian 'CeeJay' Jensen, the author of Swan.flf and Cygnet.flf
I made the fonts for people to use freely them, so I would be fine with a debian compatible license.

thx for that @CeeJayDK

i completely agree. i have no idea the licenses, if any, of these fonts. this repo exists b/c so many {friends,acquaintances,irc randos} asked me to share my collection that i put it up here. i personally am a fan of {CC0,kopimi,public domain} but i cannot speak for all the collective artists.

We can get info for some files. According to the file headers:

  • some .tlf files have a reference to WTFPL licence (see grep -i license *). These files come from toilet fonts and are already packaged in debian.
  • a lot of files has been modified by patorjk which has a github account. The repository https://github.com/patorjk/figlet.js is released under MIT Licence so I guess he would agree to add a licence on his modifications. (MIT is a DFSG licence.)
  • xero writes 3d.flf, rustofat.tlf and rusto.tlf so a licence is easily addable for those files.
  • 7 files have no name (see grep "Font Author: ?" *). It includes ANSI Shadow.flf. They comes from roysac.com website. The site is still alive but I doubt the maintainer could really help.
  • grep -e "[[:alpha:]]@[[:alpha:]]" * shows e-mail addresses that could be contacted. However, the files are old so I expect a lot of emails does not work anymore (and/or the creator doesn't care about it). We could ask them to say which licences they accept in this thread (like CeeJayDK did).

Even if we reach some of the creator, I don't think the files will be under the same licences. However, until they are DFSG-compatible, it would not be a problem.

Adding a SPDX header would help to follow each font licence. It's only including a line.

I can contact roysac.com maintainer and the emails listed in the files but I wonder if it's worth the effort.
What do you think about it?