[OpenFontLibrary] licence

[Nicolas Spalinger]

> I still haven't reached a conclusion on how to described free fonts
> best. "free fonts" speaks to freeware fonts that are often
> non-commercial, non-modifiable and even non-redistributable.

Exactly!
Let me try and make the case for another term again :-)
(quickly as other commitments want my time).

Just try a "free font" search in your preferred search engine and see
what comes up. (it's also worth nothing that a pan Unicode font project
is called "FreeFont": interesting case of blanket semantic
re-appropriation).

You can easily see that the huge majority of well-know designers and
foundries which sometimes release "free fonts" are doing it under
restricted licensing: here's a recent example from Ascender:
http://www.ascenderfonts.com/info/mayberry-pro-free-font.aspx

They can do what they want but for us to be using the very same term to
describe what our community is doing is not a good idea! Only a
potentially painful source of confusion :-(

"free fonts" is really a semantic trap we should avoid...
I disagree with the purpose of consciously choosing an ambiguous term
which will confuse/dilute even further the notion of
redistributable-modifiable font software for the vast majority of the
font design community.

I don't think want to spend our life trying to re-explain/assign new
meaning to the concept of what our community is doing to everyone who
has been associating "free fonts" with
freeware-do-not-modify-redistribute-sell-fonts for ages. How can we
distance ourselves and express our focus on quality if we use the same
term? This ambiguity would actually harm our goals.

I highly recommend "libre/open fonts" instead to describe fonts which
respect the 4 foundational software freedoms as defined by the FSF in
the specific context of fonts: run the program for any purpose, study
and adapt the program to your needs, distribute copies of the program,
improve and release improvements to the program.

I think there's a good reason both license and library already have
"open" in the name. (Note that I'm advocating "libre/open" and not "open
source").

What do others think?



Cheers,

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



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