[Openfontlibrary] On the license of Adobe Utopia font

[Christopher Fynn]

Dave Crossland wrote:

> 2008/5/21 Christopher Fynn <cfynn at gmx.net>:
>> Personally I think it it would be useful to have a series of License choices
>> available for fonts - like CC has for other artistic works.

> I agree :-)
>
> There are 3 licenses recommendable for fonts:

> http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt (attribution only)
> http://www.openfontlicense.org (weak copyleft)
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html (strong copyleft)


> There are many other free culture licenses that are used for fonts,
> but they are not recommended. www.freedomdefined.org lists some of
> them. The most popular is
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ - a weak copyleft
> license - and my wonderful classmate at Reading Paul Hunt has made
> some nice fonts using FontStruct available under that license - eg,
> http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/fontstructions/show/structurosa_1

> The OFLB will one day support those 3 licenses as choices when
> uploading a font, explain the series as the CC website does, and have
> a 4th "Other Free Software License" category that will then require a
> OFLB moderator to check the license before the font is published.

CC has the following basic choices:

Allow commercial uses of your work?
* Yes
* No

Allow modifications of your work?
* Yes
* Yes, as long as others share alike
* No

I would like to see the same set of choices available for people wanting to
licence their fonts...

Whether of not the Open Font Library site should contain "no derivatives" fonts 
is another matter. I'm just arguing for a whole range of suitable licences to be 
available for font designers.

>> Just like other creative people there are type designers who may be happy to
>> have copies of some of their fonts distributed freely - but they may feel they
>> wish to e.g. protect the integrity of their design and place some restrictions
>> on modifications or derivatives.

> Britannica wants to protect the integrity of their encyclopedia, and
> they are welcome to carry on doing that - we're off building Wikipedia
> because that attribute sucks :-)

Some people are not prepared to dive in at the deep end right away.

> As Nicolas wrote on another thread today, OFLB isn't another freeware
> font site. We only deal with modifiable, free software fonts.

I'm probably mixing two issues here: 1) what requirements there are be for
fonts distributed on OFLB site (modifiable) - 2) and what range of font
licences should there be available for type designers who in some way
want to make a font "freely" available - Though OFLB may not want to distribute 
such fonts I think something like  CC's "no derivatives" should be an option for
font developers when chosing a license as is in the case for  other kinds of 
creative work.

best regards

- Chris