SIL Open Font License revised (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 27, 2007 7:57 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

This "silliness" is here to reassure font foundries.
They're in the business of selling font packages, and hate people who copy their work to create "free font" discs. As long as the licensing does not allow raw font file dumps, but hides them withing linux packages, they're happy (that's sufficient to deter use by "creative" people, which are the foundries main customers)

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 27, 2007 13:30 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

Bull. You can create a free font disc by bundling a 2-line shell script on the disc, according to the license.

You can't have it both ways. Either clause 1 has no practical legal force because of clause 2, in which case it is pointless, or clause 1 has legal force in which case it makes the license non-free.

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 27, 2007 13:40 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

Unless your point is that the clause is there to trick foundries into thinking that the license prohibits free font discs, when in fact it does not. In which case the clause is worse than silly, it's dishonest.

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 27, 2007 13:56 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

My point is this clause was painfully negociated with Bitstream when they released Vera, it's harmless, makes foundries happy, and putting it again on the table would at best produce a slightly better license.

That is if we're lucky the foundries even agree to as lenient a clause again.

Let dragons lie. Don't wake up corporate legal departments.

honesty is the best policy?

Posted Mar 27, 2007 16:16 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

How happy will the foundries be when someone starts distributing a free font CD with their fonts by including a "Hello world" program on the CD? If you burn someone with misleading license terms, then they may be even less inclined to use any free licenses in the future.

It still seems to me that honesty is the best policy, and including license clauses whose only purpose is to convey a false impression (either to font foundries or to users/distributors) is disturbing to say the least.

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 27, 2007 16:20 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

AFAICT, foundries make their money by selling artists the moral right to use their fonts in their work. That is, the people who buy fonts don't actually have to buy them, as far as getting access to the data, or even to get away with doing what they intend to do, but they buy them anyway, because that's what the right thing to do is. This clause, therefore, is for making it so that artists don't get confused as to whether they've paid who they ought to pay. That purpose is served as long as the disc appears to be some software with some fonts, rather than the font alone.

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 27, 2007 21:17 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

Do you really believe that whether or not the distributor is required to add a 2-line "Hello world" shell script in a file somewhere on a CD will somehow help artists understand "whether they've paid who they ought to pay?"

If people pay for fonts not because they "actually have to buy them" but because it's "the right thing to do" then you don't need to add a confusing and self-defeating legal requirement in the license to achieve this. You just need to add a note saying, You're not required to pay in order to use these fonts in your commercial work, as long as you follow the above conditions, but we think it's the right thing to do—your financial support of the font creators, by purchasing an "official" font CD from XXXX, helps support the creation of free high-quality fonts.

The justifications for this clause seem pretty strained. I can believe that it's a historical artifact of the first license negotiated with Bitstream and written by people inexperienced in free-software licensing—although that's not a good reason, by itself, to keep pointless and confusing clauses when the license is revised. But adding a confusing and powerless term to the license "so that artists don't get confused" is less than convincing.

If you want to explain your view of moral (not legal) obligations to artists, just say so in a preamble or postscript, don't add circuitous legal language that you hope will somehow have a similar effect.

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 28, 2007 0:22 UTC (Wed) by rmunn (guest, #40618) [Link]

Let me try to respond, since I work for SIL. (Though I'm not directly involved in the OFL revision process).

1) Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself.
2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled, redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy contains the above copyright notice and this license.

As I know has been pointed out to them multiple times, clause (1) is utterly eviscerated by clause (2)—all you need to do is include a "Hello world" program.
On the one hand, it's harmless; it doesn't make the license non-free because it is so easily circumvented. On the other hand, SIL's continued inclusion of this pointless and (pointlessly confusing) legal hoop is odd and somewhat bothersome—it certainly doesn't inspire confidence in the legal acumen of the license authors.

Victor Gaultney, and the others who've been involved in the creation and updating of the OFL, are quite aware of how trivial the "no resale by itself" clause is to circumvent. See http://openlists.sil.org/archives/ofl-discuss/2006-December/000127.html, for example. In that post, Gaultney said, "The point is that the intent is expressed - please don't sell OFL fonts, they are meant to be free. So if you do choose to sell them with a trivial bit of code, then you know very well that you are doing something wrong. This moral check seems to satisfy many designers."

The reason for these two almost-contradictory clauses is because there are two use cases to consider:

1) Joe has created a cool font and decided to release it under a free license so that everyone can benefit from it. Two months later, he sees someone selling it for $50 at CoolFontz.com. He'd like to sue, but unfortunately the license he chose doesn't forbid resale. If only he'd chosen a different license...

2) Vladimir has written a touch-typing program designed for the Russian keyboard layout. It's got snazzy graphics, a fun game mode, and translations into many other languages so that non-Russian speakers can learn the Russian keyboard. He wants to release it under the GPL so everyone can benefit -- but he also wants to include a good Cyrillic font, since most non-Russian speakers probably won't have a Cyrillic font installed on their system. The only free Cyrillic fonts he can find are low-quality ones; the good ones don't allow bundling. Then (shameless plug alert!) he finds a great font called Gentium. Its license allows bundling with other software. Perfect!

Now, obviously the "no resale by itself" clause (clause 1) gets its teeth pulled by the "may be bundled with any software" clause (clause 2). Or does it? The second half of clause 2 restores the teeth of clause 1 to some extent. Not fully -- you can still bundle the fonts with a trivial shell script if you like. But since you have to include the OFL in your bundle or face a lawsuit, you have no way of preventing your customers from discovering that they've just been ripped off. "What? You mean I just paid $50 for a font I could have downloaded for free from its original authors? What a rip-off!" Then you get blog posts, comments on your website, and word-of-mouth, all advertising you as a rip-off artist. Your "business" of selling OFL fonts won't last long.

What if clause 2 were modified to say "any non-trivial piece of software"? Well, what's your definition of non-trivial? If you were to add the "non-trivial" qualification to clause 2, the OFL couldn't qualify as a Free/Libre license anymore -- because nobody could know for certain whether their software would be considered "non-trivial" by a court.

And so it goes. Clause 2 is necessary to protect use case 2 (bundling fonts with useful software). And if we remove clause 1, font designers scream. So we're stuck with a half-way solution. Still, the "must include the OFL" clause prevents the worst of the abuses, I think.

BTW, if anyone comes up with a *really* good way to modify clause 2 to put the teeth back into clause 1 without killing the bundling use-case, please join the OFL-discuss list and make a suggestion.

I should probably insert the usual disclaimer about my opinions being my own and not necessarily representative of SIL's opinions -- especially since I'm not working on the OFL myself.

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 28, 2007 2:27 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

The point other people have been making, though, is that if you do put the teeth back into clause 1, then the whole free software community will scream because the license will no longer be free. The "someone stole my software and is charging money for it!" issue is one we're very, very familiar with (google for "firefox" sometime, note the piles and piles of ad links for people either charging money for the download or offering spyware-infested versions...). But the hard-won community consensus is that the harm caused by stopping that in the license is worse than the harm caused by attempting to prevent it. ...Which doesn't much help convincing the font people, who mostly aren't in this community at all. It would be nice, though, to have a standard "free font" license that we could at least point to, though, while we work on building those community bridges.

Another hard-won lesson is that trying to express intent and moral suasion in the legal text of a license is a really bad idea; let the license proper concentrate on defining what happens when lawsuits pop up, and put information about intent in clear English (e.g., in a Preamble that must always be included with the license itself).

But you've probably heard all this before. I do have one concrete suggestion/question: it seems like the easiest solution in this case would be to simply require that distribution of free fonts should include the license notice unconditionally. The example scenarios you list would all turn out the same, and you avoid the egregious silliness. The GPL has similar requirements, and it doesn't cause a problem. (Heck, even the BSD license has similar requirements.) The main issue I can see is if people want to download their fonts as .ttf files, not .zip files, but it also looks like the .ttf format is extensible enough that you could trivially embed a license notice block within it, by just making up a new block name and making it a de facto standard. (It would be annoyying to teach everyone's programs to make this embedded information actually visible to users, but at least this is the same kind of dissemination-of-standards problem that software developers have solved many times before.) So what am I missing?

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 28, 2007 7:47 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> Another hard-won lesson is that trying to express intent and moral suasion
> in the legal text of a license is a really bad idea;

supporting evidence please?

> Which doesn't much help convincing the font people, who mostly aren't in
> this community at all.

Yes. Please don't try to push font people agenda in their stead. They are the ones who know the compromise they're ready to accept, they are the ones who know against whom they want to protect, trying to second-guess them will lead to harm.

Bitstream Vera has been shipping with a similar clause for years. If it was as toothless as some write, I do think people would have noticed by now.

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 28, 2007 10:19 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

> > Another hard-won lesson is that trying to express intent and moral suasion
> > in the legal text of a license is a really bad idea;

> supporting evidence please?

Hmm, fair question. It's hard to come up with specific examples in well-known licenses, because all the good licenses follow the rule I suggest. But that doesn't prove the rule is correct, that could just be a coincidence or something, so... I think what I was actually thinking of was a number of long, drawn out, extremely painful discussions attempting to teach copyright law to someone who wanted to come up with some wacky personal license, that mixed in attempts to legislate morality and expected use that had all sorts of weird side-effects. (And I had to keep trying to fix it, because I actually needed the code they had written, and under a usable license...)

The principle seems to be pretty common-sensical, though. The primary effect of the license text itself is to determine under what conditions a judge will smack people down. Because the legal system is involved, the rules cannot be very fuzzy -- to the greatest extent possible, it has to be clear to recipients (and the judge!) exactly what behaviors are allowed and which aren't. Achieving this is very difficult; there's a reason why writing a new license always takes many months of discussion, input from lots of people, expensive lawyers, etc. But, apparently this is not hard enough for some people, and so they decide to mix issues of morality and intent into the license text itself. Now the license text is trying to do simultaneously pin down unambiguously what is allowed, and _simultaneously_ present the author's moral code, and questions of morality are notoriously dependent on context and difficult to precisely formalize. Now, you _might_ be able to do that well, but I doubt it, and you're certainly expending a lot of effort when it would be so easy to just split those pieces into two different sections.

I suspect the reason many people find this tempting is the awe they feel towards legal documents; that somehow their moral opinions will carry more weight if placed in legal language. This is dubious, not to mention magical, reasoning. It's absurd to think that I could turn an action of yours from moral into immoral simply by writing a very pretty request that you stop. When it comes to copyright law, though, many people seem to actually believe this. E.g., think of all the people that believe that once a DVD's authors have expressed their intent that you should not make a backup copy for personal use, then anyone who _does_ make such a backup copy is necessarily committing an immoral act...

More concretely, the OFL's authors want to stop people who might use OFL-licensed fonts to "mak[e] money without doing any work", stop the "end user and the designer from getting cheated"[1], etc. But they can't say "no cheating!" or you "you have to work for a living!" in their license, because anything that would be effective at stopping the illegitimate use cases they're thinking of would also stop a bunch of legitimate ones, including legitimate ones that they haven't even thought of yet. So what they do instead is hang this scarlet software around the neck of people who are charging distribution costs, to make sure it's obvious to everyone that "you are doing something wrong". But one result of this is that people who aren't doing anything wrong by the normal use of the term -- say, CheapBytes selling a free font CD -- have to do this trivial (and explicitly endorsed by the license!) kluge... but then everyone who thinks that licenses carry inherent moral weight will criticize them... and generally you just end up with a bunch of arguments, bitter feelings, and even more people confused about copyright law than before.

So, yes, in my opinion (and based only on my limited knowledge), the OFL 1.1 is good, but this part is worse than it could be.

>Please don't try to push font people agenda in their stead. They are the ones who know the compromise they're ready to accept, they are the ones who know against whom they want to protect, trying to second-guess them will lead to harm.

I'm afraid I can't parse that first sentence at all, but I think I get the gist. I'm not trying to push anyone, and couldn't even if I wanted to... but I do wish that there were more free fonts (in the sense that we mean free around here!), and that the principles worked out in the free software community would spread into (some part of) the font community. The activity around the OFL is obviously getting us closer to the goal, but these discussions also show that there is some distance yet to travel.

> Bitstream Vera has been shipping with a similar clause for years. If it was as toothless as some write, I do think people would have noticed by now.

Err, the poster up-thread gave a link[1] in which one of the OFL's authors agreed that it was toothless. I'm pretty sure that means people have noticed.

[1] http://openlists.sil.org/archives/ofl-discuss/2006-Decemb...

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Mar 28, 2007 12:11 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

>>> Another hard-won lesson is that trying to express intent and moral suasion
>>> in the legal text of a license is a really bad idea;
>> supporting evidence please?
> Hmm, fair question. It's hard to come up with specific examples in
> well-known licenses, because all the good licenses follow the rule I
> suggest.

I don't have any evidence either, but every law people I've ever heard on the subject always said intent matters a lot, be it in case-law countries or in latin-law countries.

>> Bitstream Vera has been shipping with a similar clause for years. If it
>> was as toothless as some write, I do think people would have noticed by
>> now.
> Err, the poster up-thread gave a link[1] in which one of the OFL's authors > agreed that it was toothless. I'm pretty sure that means people
> have noticed.

Does not matter if it's easily circonvented and toothless in theory. What matters is that in practice, it has prevented the kind of distribution foundries care about. (whith Vera as a testcase)

A license is a tool not a work of art, if the intended effect is achieved, it works

still seems to contain egregious (but relatively harmless) silliness

Posted Apr 1, 2007 20:31 UTC (Sun) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

> Another hard-won lesson is that trying to express intent and moral suasion in the legal text of a license is a really bad idea; let the license proper concentrate on defining what happens when lawsuits pop up, and put information about intent in clear English (e.g., in a Preamble that must always be included with the license itself).

You mean, like, in GPL v3?

</me ducks and looks for cover>

:-) Joachim

relying on font designers misunderstanding the license is not a good tactic

Posted Mar 28, 2007 3:07 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

And if we remove clause 1, font designers scream.

There seem to be only two possible reasons they could have for "screaming" if you remove the impotent clause 1: either they misunderstand the license, or they hope users will misunderstand it. (Why else would they object at the removal of the clause if they understood it had no practical legal force?)

If acceptance of your license by the font designers relies on them misunderstanding the license, that is a bad, bad situation. Ethical aspects aside, one day they will discover that they misunderstood it and all hell may break loose.

And if it is intended to mislead end-users, that is even worse.

The second half of clause 2 restores the teeth of clause 1 to some extent. Not fully -- you can still bundle the fonts with a trivial shell script if you like. But since you have to include the OFL in your bundle or face a lawsuit, you have no way of preventing your customers from discovering that they've just been ripped off.

Red herring. Clause 1 (which purports to forbid sale of the fonts, but is powerless because of clause 2) has nothing to do with the requirement that the OFL be included when the fonts are distributed. Every license, from BSD to GPL, requires that distributors include the copyright and license.

(Not to mention that lots of people knowingly purchase CDs of free software, whether from Linux distributors, from GNU, or from CheapBytes, and don't necessarily feel "ripped off".)

relying on font designers misunderstanding the license is not a good tactic

Posted Mar 28, 2007 10:23 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

>Red herring. Clause 1 (which purports to forbid sale of the fonts, but is powerless because of clause 2) has nothing to do with the requirement that the OFL be included when the fonts are distributed. Every license, from BSD to GPL, requires that distributors include the copyright and license.

Bizarrely enough, the OFL does not! Or at least, I can't see it anywhere in the text, except clause 2:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&...

relying on font designers misunderstanding the license is not a good tactic

Posted Mar 28, 2007 13:31 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

There have been merchants who set up years back selling say, The GIMP on CD for $20. No mention that it's Free Software you're buying, no mention that the seller didn't create it themselves, just some screenshots of all these features and a credit card payment facility.

Now in some cases these people turned out not to be meeting the requirements of the GNU GPL and they got scolded and went away. But in a lot of cases they did everything they were legally required to do, including a source tarball right on the CD, and the only thing which stopped this sort of scam was that customers would type e.g. "GIMP" into a search engine and of course they'd figure out that they could get the same thing for free.

Fast forward a few years and the scam is more sophisticated. You don't advertise that you're selling the GIMP, you put up an eBay advert for "Photo suite 2007" and you throw in some cheap clipart with the GIMP software, on a DVD for say $19.95 plus P&P. This approach attracts mostly customers who don't know what they're buying, wouldn't know a GTK+ widget from a PCI slot and certainly won't be reading the file named COPYING on their DVD when it arrives.

It has been a hard fight to dissuade some projects from inserting "No scams please" clauses into their licenses because of this. Often people can understand that it's impossible to achieve what they want, but they feel as though they should try anyway.

Here's an analogy. Most people /understand/ intellectually that the horoscope in their daily newspaper is nonsense, but they will still object vehemently if you try to eliminate it to make room for some worthy but dull public information. That's irrational, but it's still a good practical reason for the publisher to leave the horoscope alone. You need to pick your fights.