[OpenFontLibrary] OFL problems, IPA License annoyances

[Ed Trager]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 7:07 AM, Nicolas Spalinger
<nicolas_spalinger at sil.org> wrote:
> Ed Trager wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 4:05 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
>> <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Le Lun 6 avril 2009 21:54, Dave Crossland a écrit :
>>>
>>>> A new OSI approved font license is out, the Japanese "IPA Font
>>>> License":
>>>>
>>>>     http://opensource.org/licenses/ipafont.html
>>>>
>>>> The OFLB is only going to run with the most popular free font
>>>> licenses, to encourage license consolidation, so I doubt the OFLB will
>>>> accept IFL fonts anyway.
>>> I doubt anyone but the IPA people will use it, it is overly
>>> restrictive and makes it impractical to use anything but the original
>>> font. It's a very convoluted way to say "free to use but not modify)
>>
>> Exactly.
>>
>> I am guessing that the story behind this is that there are very few
>> FLOSS Japanese fonts, and the ones clearly available for inclusion in
>> Linux distributions until now are considered unsatisfactory.
>>
>> People have for a long time considered the IPA fonts better, but the
>> vagueness of the original IPA license, available only in Japanese,
>> made it impossible for the vendors to include with Linux
>> distributions.
>>
>> I know that Mike Fabian at SuSE, who happens to know Japanese, tried
>> for a long time to get clarification on the license.  So now I guess
>> this newly published IPA Font License in English finally clears the
>> way for inclusion of the IPA fonts in Linux distributions ...
>
> And also, AFAIK Hideki Yamane and others from Debian Japan had
> translated the license and had various talks over a long period of time
> advocating a less restrictive model to IPA so that distros can include
> it. We can now see the results of these efforts for all users of the
> Japanese writing systems. It's great that IPA saw the benefits :-)
>
> So in a sense it's great news that they will re-release with a better
> license but for the future maintainership of this font family basically
> they're stuck in a silo, and I suspect the license might be somewhat of
> a barrier to contributors :-(
>
> OTOH there's the great work of Arne Gotje on CJK fonts which may > well provide the community with a .jp font family with more
> re-usable and community-known licensing.

And also don't forget the work of the WenQuanYi project, http://wenq.org/

But Japanese users may still argue that Gotje's project and the
WenQuanYi project are both "Chinese" font projects and that there are
stylistic differences among a subset of the Japanese Kanji ...

Gotje is addressing the (actually very few ... ) stylistic differences
directly using TTC.  At this point in time, I'm not sure how or if the
WQY project is dealing with the national glyph style differences ...

Best - Ed