[Openfontlibrary] Re: [DejaVu-fonts] forming new maintenance team for MPH 2B Damase?

[Jon Phillips]

On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 18:42 -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> [Trimming cc since I doubt all those other lists care.]
> 
>     > I'm also just a bit curious as to why someone thinks I should claim
>     > copyright of the font and release it under a free license.
> 
> Debian(*), among others, have pointed out that the concept of dedicating
> something to the public domain is not worldwide.  Expiration of
> copyright (and thus something becoming public domain) is universal among
> Berne Convention countries, but that's a different thing than
> individuals dedicating a work to the public domain "before its time".
> The legal status of such works is arguable, and has been argued
> (endlessly; I hope we won't rehash it here).
> 
> Therefore, they recommend (which is not to say require) copyrighting
> material with a minimal all-permissive license statement, similar to
> what Ed wrote.  Here is the recommended sentence which I was told:
>   You may freely use, modify and/or distribute this file.
> 
> It's a drag, because copyrighting something (vs. public domain) means
> having to update the list of years whenever the material is modified.
> But that seems to be the world we are living in.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain has a lot more about this.
> 
> Of course, there are plenty of other licenses with similar effect, like
> Expat (http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt).
> 
> Karl
> 
> (*) Actually, I don't know where this concern came from originally.  I
> personally first heard it from Debian developers telling me about some
> minor TeX-related files.

So, I wonder what is the thinnest license possible, that is closest to
public domain, but uses copyright, much like cc licenses to protect
authors...I'm not debating just curious...but possibly important to
explore offlist... ;)

Karl, thanks for this overview...

For Open Font License support, we are really just waiting for the
metadata so I can slap it into OFLB...I'm not sure where that is at, and
is the only reason this is not added to the site...

Jon

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Jon Phillips

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