[OpenFontLibrary] Blooming Grove

[jon at rejon.org]

I still prefer public domain as well, like OCAL.

Jon

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 6:51 AM, Jonadab the Unsightly One
<jonadab at bright.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
> --
>
> v4sw5Phw5ln5pr5FPO/ck2ma9u7FLw2/5l6/7i6e6t2b7/en4a3Xr5g5T
> http://hackerkey.com/decrypt.php?hackerkey=v4sw5PprFPOck2ma9uFw2l6i6e6t2b7en4g5T
>
>



-- 
Jon Phillips
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