[OpenFontLibrary] OFL problems, IPA License annoyances

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Ed Trager wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 4:05 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
> <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
>>
>> Le Lun 6 avril 2009 21:54, Dave Crossland a écrit :
>>
>>> A new OSI approved font license is out, the Japanese "IPA Font
>>> License":
>>>
>>>     http://opensource.org/licenses/ipafont.html
>>>
>>> The OFLB is only going to run with the most popular free font
>>> licenses, to encourage license consolidation, so I doubt the OFLB will
>>> accept IFL fonts anyway.
>> I doubt anyone but the IPA people will use it, it is overly
>> restrictive and makes it impractical to use anything but the original
>> font. It's a very convoluted way to say "free to use but not modify)
> 
> Exactly.
> 
> I am guessing that the story behind this is that there are very few
> FLOSS Japanese fonts, and the ones clearly available for inclusion in
> Linux distributions until now are considered unsatisfactory.
> 
> People have for a long time considered the IPA fonts better, but the
> vagueness of the original IPA license, available only in Japanese,
> made it impossible for the vendors to include with Linux
> distributions.
> 
> I know that Mike Fabian at SuSE, who happens to know Japanese, tried
> for a long time to get clarification on the license.  So now I guess
> this newly published IPA Font License in English finally clears the
> way for inclusion of the IPA fonts in Linux distributions ...

And also, AFAIK Hideki Yamane and others from Debian Japan had
translated the license and had various talks over a long period of time
advocating a less restrictive model to IPA so that distros can include
it. We can now see the results of these efforts for all users of the
Japanese writing systems. It's great that IPA saw the benefits :-)

So in a sense it's great news that they will re-release with a better
license but for the future maintainership of this font family basically
they're stuck in a silo, and I suspect the license might be somewhat of
a barrier to contributors :-(

OTOH there's the great work of Arne Gotje on CJK fonts which may well
provide the community with a .jp font family with more re-usable and
community-known licensing.

Cheers,


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


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