[Openfontlibrary] On the license of Adobe Utopia font

[Dave Crossland]

2008/5/21 Femke Snelting <snelting at geuzen.org>:
>
> Thomas Phinney, product Manager Fonts @ Adobe left this comment on our
> blogpost on the possible re-licensing of Utopia:
>
>> I'm open to the possibility of using OFL on the four basic faces
>> of Utopia, as long as The Lawyers are okay with it.
>> http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/?p=504

Wow! That's great news! :-)

> For typographers & designers it would be really exciting if Utopia (and
> others!) would be available as source

The font source must be some ancient Fontographer files...

> but to be able to make a
> derivative work, it's license needs to allow more than just the freedom
> to add glyphs.

That's not what I understood by Karl's message and the license.

The license says,

"Adobe grants [the public] a license ... to use, reproduce, display
and distribute the Software for any purpose and without fee provided
that the following copyright notice appears in all whole and partial
copies of the Software ...
<<Copyright 1989, 1991 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights
reserved.>> Adobe also grants [the public] a license to modify the
Software for any purpose and redistribute such modifications ...
provided that the modified Software shall not use the font name(s) or
trademark(s), in whole or in part"

Karl is saying that you can add new original parts to Utopia and use
whatever license you like for those parts - like the OFL - but you
have to include the normal two bits of copyright stuff from Adobe -
the copyright notice and the copyright license - when you redistribute
the new combined work.

> We are not as informed about legal and technical consequenses as you all
> are :-) and it looks like the trouble will be in the 'as long as the
> lawyers are ok with it'. So... we wondered whether one of you want to
> take this on?

I can if you don't want to, but I think it would be fine for you to do it :-)

> Or are you already in contact with these people?

I've met him a few times and he's a wonderfully friendly and nice guy :-)

You might also want to privately ask Victor Gaultney if he'd like to
be involved in any discussions with Adobe, as the primary author of
the SIL OFL and someone who also knows Tom already.

> Or can you help us with what we exactly should ask for?

I suggest you just email Tom privately, as he suggests, and ask what
you can do to help get Utopia republished with SIL OFL, and if there's
any chance the Fontographer sources could be OFL'd too.

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with Jono Bacon, Canonical's
"Community Manager." Tom is kind of the Adobe equivalent, for the
typography community - he attends a lot of typography conferences on
company time, presenting a range of topics from Adobe corporate stuff
to really exciting typographic history tales. He was in the news a
while back for being an expert witness in a forgery case -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_authenticity_issues#Proportional_fonts
- and actively posts on typophile.com forums.

He's the only person I've ever met who says he never, ever, not once,
does copyright infringement - not music, films, books, programs, nada
- who I could totally believe. He has my utmost respect for being
principled about things, although obviously we disagree about this
issue.

So, I think if you are not too busy, it would be great for OSP to take
this on, since you are a design group and it would be good for Adobe
to interact with designers who are using free software, since I doubt
they have much experience of that yet. If you are to busy though, I'll
be happy to take this forward :-)

-- 
Regards,
Dave