[Openfontlibrary] Re: [OFL-discuss] Why the OFL is the best Free Font license

[Nicolas Spalinger]

MJ Ray wrote:
> "Dave Crossland" <dave at lab6.com> wrote: [...]
>> But despite these unusual features of a Free license, the OFL is
>> nevertheless still widely considered Free (FSF, OSI, DFSG, GNOME, KDE,
>> FreeDesktop.org, etc etc) and is copyleft.  [...]
> 
> The last released version of OFL does not follow the Debian Free
> Software Guidelines, partly because it uses copyright restrictions to
> enforce a sort of "super-trademark" for the font name in ways which,
> frankly, are a pain for making ready-to-eat font packages from OFL'd
> fonts.  This is similar to some problems in old LaTeX licences which
> have been resolved in recent years.  For further explanations, see
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/01/msg00454.html and other
> messages in that thread.  OFL's lead developer thinks it follows DFSG,
> despite all the debian developers explaining why it does not.


Woah there,

"all the Debian developers"?

The ftp-masters have accepted the license and various OFL-licensed fonts 
are in main in both Debian and Ubuntu:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-gentium
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-sil-abyssinica
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-sil-charis
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-sil-doulos
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/linux-libertine

And packaking and submission of other OFL-ed fonts are underway.

Please don't take decisions for them about the DFSGness of software 
instead of the ftp-masters team. You insights and your experience around 
licensing are useful but ultimately you are not taking the decisions. 
This shorcut about the OFL not satisfying the DFSG is simply not true.

As for what you call "ready-to-eat", this has been discussed various 
times, please check the archives on the discussions on freedesktop.org 
If you think packaging and maintainership will be problematic, you are 
very welcome to join the font packaging team and suggest best practices.

> Hopefully, the new version of the OFL will make it clear that you can
> mention the Reserved Font Name for compatibility and configuration, as
> long as one does not claim that a modified font *is* that named font.
> There seems to be some sort of delay in producing the new OFL, sadly.

Yes, there is a unexpected delay, but it's coming soon.

And again the configuration of external font substitution systems like 
fontconfig are outside the scope of the license. In the next revision we 
will be fixing the ambiguities around the definitions.

Check the archives again, having different names for different font 
families and not creating conflicts in the namespace is a desirable 
feature of the license.

The next revision of the OFL will be released soon.

Thanks,

-- 
Nicolas Spalinger,
http://scripts.sil.org