[OpenFontLibrary] Fwd: PT Sans licensing query

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Dave Crossland wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> I think this is okay and worth encouraging; does anyone have any other
> suggestions for me to pass on to Emil? :-)

I see the ongoing discussion with them as an encouraging sign of
goodwill from a major and prestigious foundry :-)

It's great to see them considering more open terms for some of the their
fonts and mentioning that some of their clients like the idea but let's
not rush over the important details (there are also some bugs and
ambiguities in their proposed draft too).

I'll be replying to Emil Yakupov shortly.


As indicated earlier, we certainly don't want to encourage further
fragmentation of the existing licensing spectrum for libre/open fonts.

We really need to make the case that a duplicative and non-reusable font
family-specific license is NOT A GOOD IDEA. The last thing we need are
all the well-meaning foundries cooking up their own OFL-like quasi libre
license for each of the fonts they want to release for redistribution
and modification. That will really cause confusion for users and
designers, unnecessary silos for font software and community pain more
than anything else :-(

All licensing authors and stewards have a clear policy of not approving
or validating translations of licenses which could cause huge problems
and open the door to abuse but instead have a policy of encouraging
unofficial translations of the license and the corresponding
documentation alongside the original. For example for the GPL:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLTranslations and for
the OFL: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL#0b8d92bc

I need to point out that Russia is signatory to the international
copyright treaties and while providing a clear Russian unofficial
translation of a license + FAQ is very useful for understanding, I doubt
that they strictly reject software licenses not written in Russian. That
would keep away a huge amount of software. Remember we are not talking
about contracts and contract laws but about author's copyrights and
global copyright law based on the international treaties.

Of course every author/foundry is entitled to release their creation
under their own terms whatever that may be, but it they want to release
for modification and redistribution to the FLOSS community and reap the
benefits, we have a responsibility to encourage them to do it in the
best way possible: one that benefits them and doesn't create a mess in
our community...



> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Yakupov, Emil Date: 2010/1/7
> Subject: RE: PT Sans licensing query
> To: Dave Crossland
> 
> Hi Dave,
> Hope you enjoy you tour in New Zealand. I also just come back from
> skiing in Bulgaria.
> 
> Returning to our licensing question. When I told about my concern I
> meant not only possible future changes on OFL, but mostly possible
> changes in our minds. First of all -- we are going to distribute the
> fonts via Microsoft. I'm asking MS to consider possibility to include
> the fonts into one of the next recommended updates and I'm not sure
> that they will agree to bundle the font with OFL which is not
> modifiable. We also think about other similar channels and while some
> of them like to have exactly OFL, I can imagine that some of them who
> offer commercial software will not.
> And also you are right Russian-English aspect is the main and the most
> critical. In any case we need to present the License that fully
> corresponds in terms and statements to Russian federal low in the area
> of protection of intellectual property -- Chapter 4 of the The Civil
> Code.
> 
> I think that the best and most flexible way will be the following.
> We place on our site, on the site of Federal Agency and on the sites
> of local governments of Russian Federation the distributive set that
> is bundled with Russian license that will play the role of main EULA
> together with supplementary English version which will serve
> information purposes.
> I place the draft English version below for you information.
> 
> At the same time, if you agree, we will write on our site that the
> fonts are also available under SIL OFL and those who would like to
> bundle the fonts with for example Linux systems may get the OFL
> version of the font by a special request. OFL version will have the
> link to http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_web.
> 
> Best Regards
> Emil

Cheers,

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


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