[OpenFontLibrary] GPL fonts! (Was: Open Font Library submissions)

[Dave Crossland]

2008/11/10 Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>:
> Le lundi 10 novembre 2008 à 17:31 +0000, Dave Crossland a écrit :
>
>> So I think it would be fine for a font to say in its metadata,
>
> Unfortunately, in the actual world, that does not work for fonts. I
> don't know if it's because no one reads the font metadata and reminds
> font authors to correct it, or some other reason, but what we find out
> when we package fonts is that font metadata is wildly inaccurate and
> unreliable.

Here's the thing; if someone send me a random little Free TTF, I want
just as much rights as if I got the DejaVu ZIP bundle. *Probably* if I
get such a TTF, I'll go fetch the ZIP from the TTF's homepage via a
search engine, but maybe I'm offline or something, and can't check.

Casually redistributing font files "naked" is quite common, I think.
Something the "GPL+OFLB" licensing should try to deal with, I think.

> I think Ascender made a study that said non-foundry fonts were broken
> because of this.

That study was EOT propaganda, nothing more. IMO :)

> bad font metadata is very common.

Apart from copyright and licence notices, its all amenable to change
though, right?