[Openfontlibrary] design service

Dave Crossland dave at lab6.com
Thu Nov 6 03:38:18 PST 2008


2008/11/6 Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>:
>>
>> 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.

Sure - I'm talking only about totally new fonts of totally new
typeface designs (humour me) - like the kind the original poster
suggested he would make.

> 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.

I think the compatibility framework laid out in *GPLv3 allows for the
ideas of the OFL to be put into a good strong-copyleft license. Sadly
I haven't found a lawyer to work with on this, though Nicolas
Spalinger and I have been chatting about it informally for a while.

-- 
Regards,
Dave


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