[OpenFontLibrary] GPL fonts! (Was: Open Font Library submissions)

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Open Font Library list, and Bolt Cutter Design!

2008/11/10 Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com>:
>
> So, sadly, I've had to delete all these fonts.

After investigating a little further, I see at their website -
http://www.boltcutterdesign.net/fonts1.html - that they've decided to
make these fonts available under the GPLv3. So I haven't deleted them,
yet.

Since this is a free software license, I think the Open Font Library
should be willing to accept these fonts afterall, as long as a little
more work is done to make them licensed ideally.

That is, I would like to see a little more care taken over the
licensing so that it is clear that the fonts are licensed like this
(by saying so in the copyright string of the font, and including the
license text in the font, and in text files inside the ZIP archive).

I would also want to see the fonts follow the recommendation of the
FSF (the GPL's authors) and add the "font exception" that allows
people to embed your font in a PDF. This is explained briefly in the
GPL FAQ at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException and
in more detail at http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050425novalis

However, there are other issues with the GPL for fonts. I've been
talking to Nicolas Spalinger offlist about the ideal way to apply the
GPL to fonts, so I think I'll go and bring all that discussion up to
date and on to this list, and ask the Bolt Cutter Design studio to
make their excellent range of fonts a 'case study' example in GPL best
practices.

We don't have a "GPL" license plugin for our site yet, but since we
just got over 20 GPLv3 fonts - and plenty listed on our wiki - I'm now
highly motivated to get this done, like, this week - for the existing
site, and the new site at http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org

The short term fix would be to have the fonts licensed under the OFL,
but I'd like to see this great contribution as impetus to get the GPL
fonts issue handled.

What does everyone think? :-)

Best,
Dave