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

[Dave Crossland]

2008/11/10 Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>:
>>
>> TrueType and OpenType do this easily enough; the problem is getting
>> users to put the metadata there.
>
> And keep it up to date / accurate
>
> Even when there is info in font metadata we often can not trust it
> because it has been wrong so many times before.

Hmm. I disagree with that reasoning. I'm using Epiphany right now. I
go to Help, About and see:

"Copyright (c) 2002-2004 Marco Pesenti Gritti
Copyright (c) 2003-2006 The GNOME Web Browser Developers"

and click the "Credits" button and see

"Marco Pesenti Gritti
Adam Hooper
Xan Lopez
Christian Persch
Jean-François Rameau

Contact us at:
epiphany-list at gnome.org

Contributors:
Crispin Flowerday
Peter Harvey
Raphaël Slinckx

Past developers:
David Bordoley"

and click the "License" button and see

"The GNOME Web Browser is free software; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

The GNOME Web Browser is distributed in the hope that it will be
useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with the GNOME Web Browser; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307
USA"

So I think it would be fine for a font to say in its metadata,

"Copyright (c) 2002-2004 Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, George Bush Jr. This
font is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the Open Font License as published by SIL; either version
1.1 of the License available from http://ofl11.url, or (at your
option) any later version. See the Open Font License for more
details."

> Countless fonts make incomplete of plain false licensing statements in
> their metadata (Google Droid is just the last high-visibility example).

Then we should contact the authors and remind them to take care of the
metadata too.

> I'll take a detached license file and a versionned archive any day in
> the stead of their metadata equivallents. One can be trusted the other —
> not.

By providing authors with a way to upload ZIP archives - and perhaps
in the future a way to automatically generate ZIP archives with such
detatched licenses if they aren't already included - I think the OFLB
should support this.

-- 
Regards,
Dave