[Openfontlibrary] On font release practices…

[George Williams]

On Sun, 2008-07-13 at 02:37, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Some of you may have wondered why I insist all the time on detached
> licenses and other boring bureaucratic stuff. Here is what happens when
> the font author dumps a raw font file with little context:
> 
> (10:43:38) LyosNorezel: nim-nim: ping
> (10:44:41) nim-nim: LyosNorezel: pong
> (10:44:47) LyosNorezel: nim-nim: what's the usual recommended course of
> action when "upstream" of a font only provides a ttf and an otf file?
> ie., no license or tarball
Surely the correct procedure in these case SHOULD be to look inside the
font for the internal license?

This seems like a trivial thing, but it isn't even mentioned in this
conversation.

If the problem is that packagers don't know how to extract a license
from a font, then I'll write such a program.

So I get annoyed by this because these people are complaining about
something they can easily solve (assuming the font has a license inside
it, of course).

To me having a license WITHIN the font is far cleaner, far better than
having separate files. I strongly dislike the idea of separate files
because I feel it is too easy for a license file to be misplaced, but a
license within the font will only be removed by malicious users.