[OpenFontLibrary] Blooming Grove

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Fontfreedom at aol.com writes:

>> I realize this approach may not be for everyone, but after thinking
>> about the matter at some length I ended up releasing the font I
>> created (Blooming Grove) into the public domain.  My thinking was,
>> virtually any license I could release it under would have some
>> restrictions that might prevent it from being used in some way that
>> I cannot necessarily anticipate beforehand.
>  
> I'm glad to see people analyzing the SIL OFL. Some new font licenses
> (espically without the bundling restriction and/or the copyleft
> restrictions) would be a very positive thing for the wider
> acceptance of open source license fonts.

I don't have anything specific against the OFL as such.  I simply
didn't feel that it met my needs, or that any license with
restrictions would really meet my needs.  

One key aspect of this for me was that, as someone who doesn't really
do typography on a daily basis and has toes in a lot of other waters,
I did not want to leave myself in a situation wherein I would have to
pay careful attention to ongoing developments in the world of
typography and constantly consider whether the licensing on my font
needed to be updated to allow some new, previously-unforseen use.  I
have already seen, in the short time I've been paying attention to it,
one new development in typography (specifically, @font-face embedding)
that many existing font licenses did not support -- not by conscious
choice of the people writing the licenses, but simply because it was
unforseen.  Now if they want to allow that use of their fonts, they
have to change their licensing.  I didn't want to end up messing
around with stuff like that.

Someone who spends a lot more time on fonts than I do and intends to
keep close tabs on things over the decades might draw an entirely
different conclusion, but in my case I concluded that releasing the
thing into the public domain was really the best option that covered
all the bases.

I can also see how someone could take an in-between stance and object
to only certain of the restrictions in a given license but be
perfectly happy with others.  Someone for whom fonts are a major
hobby, for instance, might have stronger opinions one way or the other
about _specific_ restrictions, specific ways in which his work could
or could not be used.  

For me, however, any restrictions I could think of would just be
needless complications.  The main things I definitely wouldn't want
people to do with my font are, or at the very least certainly should
be, already covered by laws totally unrelated to intellectual
property; e.g., I wouldn't really want anyone using my font to commit
fraud, but most countries have anti-fraud laws anyway, and the ones
that don't should, so it seems unnecessary for the font license to
address that point.  That would be like enforcing file-permissions
security at the application level; the OS is supposed to enforce that
already, so burdening the application code with it is an unnecessary
complication.  To my way of thinking, the font license only needs to
include restrictions that are specific to the use of the particular
fonts licensed thereunder.  I couldn't think of anything that I felt
should be generally legal to do (with other fonts) but which I didn't
want people doing with my font specifically.  Hence, public domain.

So I guess my opinion comes down to this:  authors (of fonts or
anything) shouldn't blindly use a particular license just because it's
the most popular one.  You should think about what you want to allow
and what you want to disallow and choose a license that fits as
closely as possible to those requirements.

I don't think that means everyone should write his own licenses on a
per-font basis.  That would just lead to a whole lot of extra licenses
for every user to try to familiarize himself with, and confusion over
what they all mean.  Nobody would gain anything from that, except
maybe lawyers (and I don't think they need the help).

But the option I picked (public domain) is already well documented
(and, among people who know anything at all about copyright, pretty
well understood, I think).  Yet, it's also an option that meets my
needs better than I felt the OFL would do.  Basically, I considered
the existing well-understood options and picked out the one that I
thought was best for my font.  I do think other authors should think
along similar lines to that.

-- 

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