[OpenFontLibrary] Expat License

[Nicolas Spalinger]

> The "positioning" of our recommended licenses is crucial. I think
> overtly we only recommend the OFL, but on the upload form we have 4
> license choices: "a free license (moderation)" "OFL" "$permissive
> license" "GPL-OFLB-style"
> 
> I think all these funny named licenses mean nothing to most type
> designers, so they should not be used.

I agree that there's a need to explain them and their use cases but
having the submission form hide from the submitter the actual name and
terms of the license they are releasing under is at best abuse of trust.
IMHO not what the project wants.

> "Public Domain" is recognised in every day language.

In which language, in which jurisdiction? To mean what exactly?

> It is what we have today. I think there is a strong case for keeping it - unless
> something concrete happens with "authors rights" being retracted in
> the whole wide free software community. The problems with PD are all
> theoretical problems that have not yet effected anyone, as far as I
> know.

I don't think they're all that theoretical... Why would distro legal
teams spend so much time discussing the problems and advocate to
upstreams that they clarify their statements? Why would Creative Commons
try to come up with something better?

> Perhaps when CC-Zero comes out, we can switch to that. That would be
> good, CC has a lot of recognition and referring to them helps widen
> recognition of the whole free culture thing. But the Non Commercial CC
> licenses are a bit iffy, if we recommend CC too much, we might get
> CC-NC fonts appearing in the moderation queue.

Remember that there is the issue that CC are licenses designed for
content and not software.

I agree that we don't want NC for font software.

> I have one suggestion: We could use the "Do What The Fuck You Want To
> Public License" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
> 
> ----------- 8< --------
>            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
>                    Version 2, December 2004
> 
> Copyright (C) 2004 Your Name
> Your, Address, Some, Place, Nice.
> Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
> copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
> as the name is changed.
> 
>            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
>   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
> 
>  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
> ----------- 8< --------
> 
> I think that could *appeal* to a young 'designer' part of our
> potential community/"audience". But could put off older, gentler,
> parts, so maybe not best.

Well, if we're going down the route of silly licenses, I recommend
instead the Beerware license from phk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware
Much more code released under that license and attribution is still
kept: you really want to know who you're having a chat over a drink with :-)


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
http://planet.open-fonts.org


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