[OpenFontLibrary] A preview of the fonts on OFL (includes a backup of nearly all fonts and a way to download them)

[Iwan Gabovitch]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Nicolas Spalinger <
nicolas_spalinger at sil.org> wrote:

>
> > Also, would anyone want to take on this task to help do monthly
> > release of the fonts?
> >
> > Setting up a cronjob is a nice way to keep it always happening, and
> > save like the last 30 days of files at a time in the package, then
> > just take the 1st of the month and make a new package!
>
> I hate to rain on this parade but seriously, I don't think this is such
> a good idea at all!
>
> I doubt your automatically produced deb or rpm is up to the standards to
> become part of a distro archive. It will create problems with existing
> open font packages and duplication pains. Not cool.
>
> Also the OFLB shouldn't be doing big releases of a big pile of very
> different things, each font is released separately by their author on
> the OFLB, we should respect that.
>
> I recommend focusing on the remaining integration tasks and the font audit.
>

Do you mean quality control? Or copyright control? (Or both?)

Can we be sure that the currently available fonts on OFLB are all licensed
under the licenses that are attached to them? (The PD and OFL icons)

The insecurity of possibly illegally included fonts would be the main
blocker for creating auto-packages in my eyes. This is one of the
motivations I had for creating the previews: having more eyes being able to
look at the fonts and warn us if they see one that is non-free. (On the
other hand: I am absolutely unable to tell if a font is legally
OFL-licensed/PD or not. How should anybody else..)

One way would be to have one folder with all the non-free fonts of the world
and one with all the ones from OFLB and compare md5 sums or render them and
compare the md5 sums of the rendered images. Not realistic unfortunately.

Or are my fears without reason and in fact every submission has been looked
at by multiple font professionals from the libre font community so there is
a fair amount of safety? :)

Clarification: I am talking about people uploading non-free freeware fonts
out of good will, not people taking for-sale fonts, modifying them and
uploading them to make OFLB have legal problems, which is something I don't
believe is going to happen.


>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
> Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
> http://planet.open-fonts.org
>
>
>
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