[Openfontlibrary] Font File Type and Admins?

[Karl Berry]

Raph's question of whether the idea of the Open Font Library is intended
to be 
(a) a collection of all major freely available fonts, or 
(b) only those fonts which can be guaranteed to be cross-compatible
    (e.g., taking characters from one and putting it into another)
seems the critical one to me.  If the former, it really seems to me that
requiring the OFLicense defeats the purpose.  If the latter, then just
OFLicense makes sense.(*)

    But its a changable fact :-)

Glibly said :), but the amount of effort involved is phenomenal.  Yes,
in some cases, with extreme effort and proper contacts at the copyright
holders (most importantly Bitstream and URW), you could conceivably get
the licensing changed.  Do not expect it to be easy or that people will
just jump on it without prompting.

In other cases, there is no chance whatsoever that it will be changed.
One example (that probably no one here cares about) is Computer Modern.

Another example, perhaps more compelling, is the significant body of
fonts produced by the Polish designers Boguslaw Jackowski and Janusz
Nowacki.  They have no single web page, but http://tug.org/fonts
mentions most of the fonts they are done (among others).  They are
currently extending the base35 fonts to cover the rest of the Latin
scripts (http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/) and more,
as they already did for Computer Modern.  They've also digitzed some
historical Polish fonts.  Their fonts are in OpenType as well as other
formats, so they are interesting on that front anyway :).  The relevant
point here is that they use the LPPL; we knew about the OFLicense, but
the LPPL was preferred for various reasons.  There is no chance it will
be changed.

There are many other fonts produced for use with TeX
(http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/fonts), covering Latin and non-Latin
scripts, ancient alphabets, phonetics, etc., etc.  None of them use the
OFLicense (since they predate it).  Maybe they aren't relevant here
either, but I thought I'd mention it.

    USA is one I think.

I am quite sure that public domain exists in the US.  In fact, US
copyright law is more or less based on the concept (copyright expires
and then the work "goes into the public domain"), until Congress started
being unconstitutional about it.  But never mind :).

Best,
Karl


(*) Personally, I would like to see another version of the Open Font
License released, addressing the issues that have been brought up on
ofl-discuss before getting this bandwagon rolling at full speed.  But
anyway ...