[OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> Le Jeu 26 mars 2009 09:33, Alexandre Prokoudine a écrit :
>> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 7:50 AM, minombresbond wrote:
>>> Warning: SIL Open Font License
>>> http://perens.com/blog/2009/02/17/64/
>>>
>>>
>>> "There appears to be an unintended loophole that would allow the
>>> conversion of any font under the license to public domain."
>> Can't tell until he bothers to actually explain the problem. So far he
>> only managed to say how lousy creators of OFL were.
> 
> Basically, his opinion is that the license does not make clear that
> even though the OFL effects do not extend to works OFL material is
> embedded in, the embedded material is still protected by the OFL. So
> according to him one could strip licensing of any OFL font by
> embedding it then extracting the result.

Bruce's concern is misguided by the practicalities of the issues related
to font extraction. Notice how with *all his history and experience in
licensing* he still uses conditional expressions... Beyond the ad
hominem criticizing (yeah, we never have enough flamewars to keep us
from working together!), I don't think he has had time to do full
research on the subject. His statement that SFLC attorneys (or others in
the community for that matter) have not looked at the license is simply
untrue. Also his statement "the SIL license" is untrue: he ignores the
fact that SIL has also released various pieces of libre software under
LGPL, GPL, MIT/X11.

He was mixing the concepts of bundling with that of embedding.

I think you will all agree that an embedded font (an actual part of the
document it is embedded in) is not fully bit-identical to its original
upstream format: the act of embedding will transform the font to make it
usable from within that document. If extraction is attempted then the
resulting file will not be the same as the original upstream font.  If
you copy the font file inside a zipped-up document structure like he
suggested and copy it out you haven't done embedding nor extraction you
are just bundling/redistributing the same font unchanged which is
explicitly allowed but does not allow anyone to strip away the copyright
and the licensing the authors have chosen.

As steward of the OFL for the community we have published an updated FAQ
(version 1.1-update1) to continue providing practical help to users and
authors of open fonts with expanded sections covering issues like
embedding, web fonts and extraction:
http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web

It's well-worth noting that Bruce's concerns didn't prevent the OSI
board from now officially recognizing the OSD (Open Source Definition)
compliance of the OFL v1.1 and listing it on the approved licenses page:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

They now join the rest of the community in officially recognizing the
usefulness of the OFL for collaborative font design.

Now, how do other font license who claim community input and review
actually deal with the extraction issue? That would be our next
challenge... Though experiment: By Bruce's line of thought any random
person could include all GPL-ed fonts inside a zip and copy them back
out to re-release them... The current GPL font exception certainly does
not cover that very clearly (and I'm not talking about the other
problems). All the source requirements (as hard to define as they are)
are now gone!


Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org


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