[tdicola]

Be careful, the files are CC licensed but the actual fonts are still copyright whoever/whatever created them. They didn't redraw or create new fonts here, they ripped out the old fonts from the systems that used them and converted to TTF, etc.

[EvanAnderson]

Copyright of bitmap fonts is less straightfoward than it might appear. (Vector fonts are more apt to be recognized as "computer programs", but simple renderings of the alphabet are, for example, not considered able to be copyrighted in the United States.)

[SwellJoe]

I'll worry about that when I get a cease and desist (I don't expect to get a cease and desist...the market value of these fonts is approaching zero, and from the history I know of these old fonts, there was a lot of borrowing even back then).

[viley]

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!

[chris_wot]

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.