[Openfontlibrary] It's not clear how to contribute

[Jon Phillips]

On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 15:20 +0200, Nicu Buculei wrote:
> Simon Huerlimann wrote:
> > Hi all
> > 
> > I just found out about your project. Of course it was a weblog that sent me 
> > your way;-) I guess you can need some more publicity.
> 
> the project is not working at full speed mainly because all of us are 
> busy with other various tasks.
> Honestly, our intention was to push it somewhere in the next year, when 
> we hope the infrastructure of openclipart.org will be in a good shape 
> and we can port it also here.
> 
> of course, if something better happen (like you join the project and 
> help us), we can do things sooner.

Yes, this would be stellar! We need some good folk to push on
openfontlibrary!

> > I've filed a bug on the website for openclipartlibrary to include a link to 
> > you:
> > https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4979
> 
> open clip art library, open font library - we are the same people :p
> We have not added the link in the first place because we thing this 
> project is not yet ready for primetime.

Exactly!

> > I'm interested in what you goals are. It's not clear to me, how one could 
> > exactly help.
> 
> as stated on the front page "The goal of this project is to collect 
> public domain fonts so that they may be used freely."

We need to have a discussion about licensing for fonts. I have been
talking with the general counsel at Creative Commons about the problems
with fonts, in that in that the US, fonts are not protected under
copyright. Anyhow, I will save my thoughts for another email.

> > As a library, I guess you want to get as much as you get. Are there plans to 
> > create packages for distributions out of them? If so, lists of all available 
> > font packages in various distributions would be nice.
> > 
> > Do you want people to
> >  * create new fonts, and submit it to you?
> 
> yes, this is one of our main goals

Yes!

> >  * spider the web, check licences and submit the fonts I found?
> 
> this is also one of the things we want to do, but our constraint is 
> "public domain fonts", i am not very confident we will find many fonts 
> with the right license

This is true. We need to discuss the licensing for fonts.

> >  * create scripts to extract fonts from Debian/Redhat packages?
> 
> only if those fonts are public domain and in my knowledge, Debian/Redhat 
> does not contain fonts with such license (LGPL as Bitstream Vera is much 
> restrictive compared with Public Domain)

Fonts don't have copyright, only the technology that is used to
view/produce them...that is the real hurdle.

> > I guess all of these, but you should state more clearly what you want. Would 
> > be nice if you could include some more information about how to help on a 
> > wiki page,

http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki

> > Anyway, I'm happy that you started this project and hope for his success.

Thanks! Yes, I think it will be successful but in a much longer term
than normal.

Jon

-- 
Jon Phillips

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