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

[Nicolas Spalinger]

>     I recommend focusing on the remaining integration tasks and the font
>     audit.
> 
> 
> Do you mean quality control? Or copyright control? (Or both?)

First the appropriate licensing and authorship checks but then the
quality control of the fonts themselves is also a goal: tarball
structure with required files, FONTLOG, coverage, etc as Ed and Ben have
developed the tools and interfaces for that. I realize that quality
criteria can be subjective but need to a way to separate the wheat from
the chaf.

We're aiming for quality offering: a smaller selection but certified to
be under the appropriate libre licenses and overall of much higher
quality than the junk (or rare gems with a lot of junk mixed in) you
usually find on freeware sites.

> 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)

Yes, there are already various problems with many fonts currently
uploaded. Hence the need for a full audit before launch.

> 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..)

Exactly, and package maintainer never like having to deal with packages
under multiple licenses. Gigantic packages with lots of different
licenses, origins, authors and end-purposes are a big no-no when they
can easily be split like the policies require for fonts in major distros
like Debian and Fedora.

> 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.

Yes we're certainly not going to check the whole world.
But we need to make sure our own stuff is checked and validated and that
we drop the dubious stuff.

Seriously, we leave that stuff to the gazillion freeware font sites.

> 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? :)

That's what we need to do so that users of the library can trust that
only validated and quality items are available.

> 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.

Well this has already happened.

Even with a lot of goodwill we make mistakes :-)
But we need to be reactive in getting them fixed to maintain the quality
focus of the library otherwise people will simply loose interest.

Cheers,


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