[Openfontlibrary] On font release practices…

[George Williams]

On Sun, 2008-07-13 at 10:17, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 2. a detached license file is unambiguous.
False. See below.
> 3. a detached license file is so in the face you can safely assume
> upstream did not ship it inadvertantly
Only for the packager. Not for the user. See below.
> 6. we don't trust font metadata. We don't trust it for font versions, we
> don't trust it for copyright dates, and we certainly do not trust it for
> licensing conditions. It's so often wrong, misfiled, copied from an
> unrelated font, or just not up-to-date that's not even funny. If we
> trusted it and required fonts to have accurate metadata we'd have to
> drop a large number of the fonts we ship. (that does not mean we do not
> look at metadata, but that it's no more than a hint to us)
If the metadata are wrong then that's a bug in the font, and should be
fixed. If you ship a font with an external license file which is
different from the font's own metadata then you have just introduced
ambiguity.

>From the perspective of a user, an external file will soon be lost.
Fonts get installed into a common directory. The only way for the user
to find the license of an installed font is through the metadata. Maybe
only sophisticated users will do this, but some user WILL. If they get
incorrect information then that is far worse than no information.

> Please publish fonts accompagned by detached license files. If you want
> you can put it in metadata too, but we really want the detached file
> (with the full licence text not an ambiguous reference). 
I don't mind detached licenses as such -- provided they are the same as
the internal metadata. What I was primarily objecting to was putting
things in a zip file.

A zip file adds a level of complexity. It makes it much more difficult
to automate the generation of preview images.