[Openfontlibrary] more updates on Open Font Library

[Jon Phillips]

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 11:50 +0100, Dave Crossland wrote:
> On 23/10/06, Jon Phillips <jon at rejon.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Open Font License
> > > CC licenses
> > > FreeArt license
> > > GNU GPL v2
> >
> > I'm not sure...fonts are a very murky area which pushes me to think
> > public domain is the way (like clip art)
> 
> I will write about this ASAP, but I think public domain is a bad idea
> for fonts - like you say, its a murky area, and the OFL does the best
> job IMO.
> 
> Real life is literally tugging at my coattails, so I'll keep it terse:

Cool...however, I see that there is no issue with allowing a font to be
put into the public domain and then also allowing it to be then licensed
under open font license.

I am however skeptical of license confusion, but willing to debate this
more and possibly be wrong (on my part).

> > The Open Font License sounds reasonable, but I'm curious to hear more
> > ideas about its usage.
> 
> The success of FLOSS is centered around a solid foundation of
> consensus about the GPL.
> 
> The success of the Free Font Movement [0] depends very much around
> licensing consensus.

I agree...

> The Open Font License is a Free license recognised by the pillars of
> the community (FontForge [1], OSI, FSF, FDo, Debian, GNOME, KDE, etc
> etc) that is specifically written for Fonts.

I'm still curious to see how it fits into the grand scheme of things
with International law.

Also, for it to work on our system, we need to integrate it well with
ccHost and use the standard creative commons ways of expressing this
license (which is a good thing) so that we can integrate it into ccHost,
if we go that route.

The primary benefit of this are the three representations of a license,
as espoused by Creative Commons, of which, the mechanical is very
important. Please inspect how one picks a Creative Commons license and
then how they are presented with three versions of a license.

As I said before, CC is not interested in fonts and/or figuring out how
to get the CC licenses to work for fonts (even though some ppl. might
use them somewhat inaccurately for fonts) which leaves Public Domain
declaration and the Open Font License (not to be confused with the
acronym of this project) as the only two options for this project.

> Existing Free Font projects have recently switched or are considering
> switching to the OFL. [3]
> 
> I believe the OFLicense should therefore be the only option for the
> OFLibrary, to help accelerate the momemtum of the OFLicense.
> 
> I'd concede using the GPL for historic compatibility like Unifont [4],
> but I'd rather persuade font projects currently using the GPL to start
> using the OFL and then offering their OFL version on OFLibrary.

Yeah, as I said previously, the GPL and LGPL are for source code. There
accuracy in application outside of code is dubious and not encouraged.
So I really think that GPL is not the right license.

> Sorry for being terse, gotta go!

All is well :)

Jon

> [0]: http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html
> 
> [1]: http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/faq.html#license
> 
> [3]: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=OFL_fonts
> 
> LinuxLibertine and Consolata are OFL/GPL dual or OFL, and there is
> movement torwards OFL at Bitstream :-)
> 
> [4]: http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/
> 
-- 
Jon Phillips

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