[Openfontlibrary] design service

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 6 novembre 2008 11:27, Dave Crossland a écrit :
>
> 2008/11/6 Christopher Fynn <cfynn at gmx.net>:
>>
>> I also wonder whether free software licenses (designed for software)
>> are
>> appropriate for fonts where a font is first published in a country
>> where
>> the design is protected?
>
> That is an excellent point!
>
> I think the language in the GPL and Apache licenses about software
> idea patents are useful to think about here.... But I haven't seen
> anyone in the free software community comment on this, though.

You must remember that free/open fonts have much higher licensing
requirements than proprietary fonts (where you can always ask the
legal department to replace their latest stupid clause with another
stupid clause in case of problem or market change like @font-face or
embedding). In free/open projects you often inherit licensing from
someone else and tracing back all the right holders to effect a
licensing change is usually prohibitively complex.

Free/open licenses must stand the test of time and be simple enough
anyone can understand them and work in international contexts.

Licenses like the GPL had lots of legal work put in to achieve this.
Most font-specific licenses fail miserably because they include too
much font-designer-oriented complexity that introduces new failure
point.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot