[Openfontlibrary] Fwd: [sugar] Royal National Institute for the Blind low-vision fonts now under GPL v3 - use in OLPC?

[Dave Crossland]

On 24/11/2007, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
>
> Le vendredi 23 novembre 2007 à 22:07 +0000, Dave Crossland a écrit :
> > The first GPLv3 font? :-)
>
> Has the GPLv3 fixed the embedding-in-pdf problems of GPLv2?

No

> I don't see the embedding exception Red Hat had to add to its Liberation
> fonts on the Tiresias site
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/LiberationFontLicense

RNIB should add the FSF Font Exception to its copyright license, yes.

Btw, Red Hat didn't just add the exception advised by the FSF at
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException
(with more information at
http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-April/010658.html
and http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050425novalis )

They had an additional "exception" which is in fact a restriction (an
anti-tivoisation restriction, ironically) and since no further
restrictions can be added, there is a big question over how they can
be redistributed at all. This was discussed within Debian -
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-legal@lists.debian.org/msg36597.html
- and the text is:

"(b)As a further exception, any distribution of the object code of the
Software in a physical product must provide you the right to access
and modify the source code for the Software and to reinstall that
modified version of the Software in object code form on the same
physical product on which you received it."

Once OSI approves GPLv3, then Red Hat can use GPLv3, and that has many
improvements over GPLv2 including this kind of restriction.

-- 
Regards,
Dave