I don't get it. If every change is tracked by github and he gives links and attribution to TAAG what is the problem? Is there any license issues involed that i can't grasp? What is the original codes license? In what license the new library is distributed?
The original code was not open source. It just happened to be JavaScript so it was possible to steal it.
Just for anyone who doesn't know: when no explicit license or copyright information is given this means all rights are with the author. Code is only ever public domain when it is explicitly put there by the author.
If you want to take a hardline attitude towards it, then TAAG itself is in iffy territory, because many of the fonts it uses were just thrown on BBSs or the internet with no explicit open licenses. He seems to have just assumed (probably correctly) that if they were put online, or as part of "figlet font packs", then a BSD-style license was intended, but there isn't an explicit one on most of them.
That has more to do with the vagaries of U.S. copyright law than anything to do with ethics, though, doesn't it? Unless you think that, when it comes to reuse of creative materials, whatever the copyright law of the country you live in says is what the ethical thing is? Font designers definitely still consider it theft when someone rips off one of their fonts--- just theft that they can't legally do anything about.
In this case, though, my guess is that the figlet font packs are copyrightable, especially since he didn't just copy the font shapes (as you say, not copyrightable in the U.S.), but literally included the entire original binary code of the fonts, and even their commentary/packaging/etc. That's of course fine, because they were produced / distributed in the context of a community in which BSD-style licensing terms are assumed as the default--- an understanding he seems to have violated. It's in his legal right to build something on figlet fonts and then (c) All Rights Reserve it, but it doesn't seem in keeping with the share-things spirit that he himself benefited from.
Since they are not copyrightable, why do people pay lots of money to the foundries to use them? Seems like we'd be able to freely distribute things like Gotham, and anything from Veer.
Things like TrueType font files are considered computer code and copyrightable, because they have some embedded scaling and kerning logic, which makes it a bit harder to just use them free. The designs themselves (in the U.S.) aren't copyrightable though, so anyone can legally rip off the font by e.g. tracing it. There are quite a few of those floating around, but they have a reputation for being poor quality, esp. with kerning and such, depending on how quick the tracing/repackaging job was. That, and there's a risk that if you used one of the "ripped off" fonts and it was different in a way that was noticeable, your publishing house / design firm / etc. would get a bad reputation in the trade.
Probably FIGlet font packages have some kind of license, which is open enough, and the problem goes back to FIGlet and not to the original author.
If the original authors had some problem with someone using these fonts (and keep in mind that ASCII fonts are somehow "easy" to think from scratch!) they would have complained way earlier.
