[Vtigercrm-developers] Licensing of GNU Freefont (GPL) inside TCPDF library (LGPL) inside vtiger (VPL/SPL)

[Alan Bell]

prompted by the other discussion I had a poke about in the source tree 
and found that whilst the TCPDF library itself claims to be LGPL it 
includes some fonts that claim to be GPL, see:

libraries/tcpdf/fonts/freefont/CREDITS
libraries/tcpdf/fonts/freefont-20060126/CREDITS
libraries/tcpdf/fonts/freefont-20060126/COPYING
libraries/tcpdf/fonts/freefont-20060126/README
libraries/tcpdf/fonts/freefont-20100919/CREDITS
libraries/tcpdf/fonts/freefont-20100919/COPYING

These were dropped from the package when tcpdf was included in Debian 
because whilst GPL would be OK for Debian these don't contain the 
sources to build the fonts.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=495985

There is a GPL font exception 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_font_exception 
https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/license.html which is intended to 
allow fonts to be used in non-free documents, that does apply to the GNU 
freefont fonts but it doesn't help much, as that only applies to 
documents embedding the fonts.

This appears to be an error on the part of tcpdf (I don't think they can 
be LGPL and include GNU freefont) but I think vtiger should probably 
drop the freefont stuff, or package it separately as something users can 
install if they want. Distributing it together seems unwise.

Alan.