Walter Landry wrote: > Nicolas Spalinger <nicolas_spalin...@sil.org> wrote: >> Paul Wise wrote: >>> I'd strongly suggest to indicate a preference about which license you >>> would like them to choose. >>> >>> I would personally suggest standard FLOSS licenses like BSD, >>> MIT/Expat, ISC, GPL + font exception etc. If those aren't acceptable, >>> the SIL OFL is a DFSG-compatible compromise between font foundry needs >>> and free software principles. >> Yes! Recommending a particular validated model and explaining how it >> will benefit both upstream and downstream is much more effective in such >> advocacy efforts. >> >> I recommend you take advantage of the campaign resources on >> http://www.unifont.org/go_for_ofl/ >> >> Considering how various key Libre Software communities have given their >> support to the licensing model it seems like a good model to recommend >> to URW. Various fonts in CTAN are under OFL as well. > > Please do not recommend the OFL. Legally requiring a name change is > unfriendly and subject to abuse. Not allowing a font to be sold by > itself is a useless countermeasure. It is GPL-incompatible to boot. > As someone who just recently needed a GPL compatible font, it was > quite annoying trying to find one.
Hi Walter, There are obviously varying needs and preferences (prejudices?) along the licensing spectrum but IMHO your reply is very reductive. At the end of the day upstreams make up their own mind about how they license their own creation but allow me to explain the reasoning of the OFL model a bit more: A name change mechanism has already been in use for a while for many of the core fonts the distros have included in their main archive and use by default (Dejavu or Liberation for example): the OFL simply makes that mechanism generic, re-usable and understandable by actual upstream authors of fonts and downstream modifiers. Similar ways of requiring a derivative branch not to advertise itself as the upstream branch or the trunk exist in other community-recognized licenses. The BundlingWhenSelling clause has been researched, validated and recognized as a useful nexus between the concerns of the actual producers of font software and the free/libre software values. It is social signalling that font designers want and that still satisfy the DFSG. You may see it as useless from your perspective but many others can guarantee you that various libre/open fonts would never have been released by their authors without this clause. For the GPL imcompatibility, fonts are much more useful aggregated to rather than "merged" with existing software, possible incompatibility with existing software licenses is not a problem. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Fonts You say you needed a "GPL-compatible font" but what does that mean? I assume you needed a font to bundle with when distributing a piece of software under GPL, right? OFL-ed fonts explicitely allow anyone to bundle. (even with restricted software). OTOH you probably want to recommend an external open font instead by adding a package dependency. BTW one of the goals we have in the Debian fonts team is to work to reduce the big duplication of fonts in various packages in our archive: there is no absolute need for every single piece of software to ship with its very own set of fonts... Sometimes it does but from a Debian perspective IMHO a dependency is much nicer. There is a lintian check for this too. I do agree that GPL-compatibility is great and very desirable but fonts have a different set of requirements corresponding to their special status and usage scenarios. BTW when looking for fonts for your own use you may find the review that we run weekly on the Debian fonts team useful: http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org/review/ > Also, I found this page > > http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Font_Licensing > > which mentions > > Despite the problems, the base 35 PostScript fonts donated by URW++ > to (originally) the Ghostscript project are licensed under the GPL, > with an exception similar to the font above. > > But then I found this page > > http://www.advogato.org/person/raph/diary/257.html > > which says > > By the way, URW did not donate these fonts under the GPL out of > their own hearts. Artifex paid good money for them, and donated them > out of a mix of self-interest and altruism. > > So is may be easy to change the license to GPL, but you may want to > talk to Artifex, not URW++. TTBOMK previous attempts have not been successful, anybody is welcome to try again. Also IIRC GUST had derived a branch under LPPL. You may want to search for that. I don't recall the exact details. I'll simply point out that Raph Levien (whose diary you link to) has chosen to release some of his own fonts under the OFL finding that the model makes sense. BTW have you read through the thread in -devel that he linked to? >> Hopefully your advocacy efforts will benefit many people throughout the >> communities. Thanks! Let us know how it goes. >> >> BTW the font exception for the GPL still has a bunch of unsolved >> problems. I wouldn't recommend that. > > What are these problems? A quick search yielded nothing. The fact that the exception may disappear downstream and that as an end-user it's tricky to know if you can safely embedd or not without suddenly having to satisfy the GPL requirements for your whole document or not... And that from a designer perspective there are no name collision protection, no reputation protection, no explicit declaration to derive artwork from the outlines, and of course the trouble with defining what font sources are and how to properly satisfy the GPL requirement in this context. Also v2 and v3 react differently. The patent clauses could be misunderstood and scare away font designers when they mistake it with "design patents"... The font exception was written way back with not a huge of amount of discussion with font designers and the FSF is still looking for feedback. IHMO using the exception is really an exception considering the increasing body of libre/open fonts we now enjoy. There's plenty of discussions on the open font library mailing-list for example. If you want to contribute to getting this fixed, I recommend you talk to Dave Crossland who has been proposing to tackle this for years... Anyway, let's see what happens for URW Garamond No. 8. > Cheers, > Walter Landry > wlan...@caltech.edu HTH, cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary http://planet.open-fonts.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4bc6fb1d.2000...@sil.org
