[OpenFontLibrary] Should we (via moderation) accept all Free Software licenses?

[Nicolas Spalinger]

> It seems fonts developed in sourceforge like systems may not be able
> to support font linking at all, or only from their own sites.
> 
> So, as policy, should we (via moderation) accept all Free Software licenses?

By Free Software licenses I assume you mean licenses positively rated in
the FSF license list? In the fonts section only or not?
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/

The trouble is that many licenses used by fonts out there have not been
through community/FSF review.

Also IMHO a light moderation system should be set up for all
submissions. There were cases before where some submissions under
supported licenses have been found to be under different licenses or
from restricted fonts. We really want to be serious about this licensing
audit and bar any accusation from anyone on being lax about respecting
the rights of authors. We don't want to kill our reputation...

> I'd like a "show of hands" - Please reply with your name and then
> "yes" or "no" - we can then debate the "no"s :-)
> 
> Dave Crossland: Yes
Nicolas Spalinger: No

Instead I highly recommend a limited set of licenses which work well
with fonts and cover the various approaches:
- OFL
- MIT/X11/Expat (much better than PD)
- GPLv3 + reworked font exception

So here are my reasons which I discussed earlier (and which Jon also
insisted on):
- we want to reduce licensing proliferation and not encourage tons of
organisation and project-specific licenses but have re-usable licenses
to get patches to flow between branches and between projects. Licensing
proliferation fragments our community. Common and well-defined licenses
help sharing and reusability.
- many free software licenses are not adapted to the needs of font
design and font use, (they are great but they are not designed with
fonts in mind) so why encourage problems for designers and end-users?
Licenses not dealing with embedding are problematic for example.
Licenses designed for content are not appropriate for fonts, etc.
- the OFLB's differentiating feature is that we don't become another
all-the-fonts-you-can-get website but that we're serious about clear and
trustworthy licensing and we focus on quality fonts.

Of course, for existing and very active font projects like Dejavu we
should consider exceptions for hosting.

/me ducks for the flamewar...

-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
http://planet.open-fonts.org


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