Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Yes - while working on this pack I did look into the question of copyright on the original bitmap fonts; what I found seems to indicate that the designs may not be copyrightable as such (e.g.: http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=164817#p164817), although I'd still rather err on the side of caution, hence the disclaimer at the end of the readme. If they were copyrightable, I imagine that IBM would've sued graphics card manufacturers left and right - from Hercules (which ripped the IBM MDA font bit-for-bit) to the multitudes of VGA clone manufacturers who also used IBM's fonts.

BTW, just to correct one of the above comments: a few of my own versions did involve some redrawing/original design (specifically the extended 'PxPlus' unicode variants, and the BIOS-only fonts which originally included only the lower 128 ASCII characters). Although of course this has no bearing on any copyright (or lack thereof) on the originals.

At any rate, sure - I encourage you to use these fonts in your projects, and thanks for the comments!



I joked on the Libreoffice IRC developer channel that we would include them in the 5.2 release :-) nobody trouted me, which is a worry.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: