font-decompress

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 22:05:43 -0700

Berkeley Decompression Code

Way back in 1989 or thereabouts, I added code to the font library to load compressed font files without forking/execing an external library. I did this by borrowing code from BSD and rewriting the interface to match what the font library needed.
Unfortunately, at that point, the BSD license included the dread advertising clause which makes the code incompatible with the GPL. As this code is useful only to load font files compressed with the 'compress' utility, and as Linux distributions have not (ever? recently?) included that utility because of patent concerns, I've simply removed the BSD licensed code from the font library.
If anyone needs this functionality, I believe the NetBSD version of the compress code uses the new advertising-free BSD license and so could be stuck into the font library without difficulty. Please submit a reasonably licensed version of decompress.c, or event the raw relevant code from NetBSD and we'll get it working again.