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The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensingThe Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensingPosted Oct 14, 2010 3:03 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)Parent article: The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing
simply examining the names, a user would have no idea that the DejaVu family is related to Liberation. Which is fine, since it is not related. The DejaVu family is a derivative of the Bitstream Vera family: it says so right on the project webpage. The article makes no mention of Vera, which is odd since the Vera family was the first high-quality set of screen fonts available on Linux/X. (High-quality postscript fonts for printing existed earlier, but displayed poorly on the screen.) The two most widely used licenses for free and open fonts are the Open Font License (OFL), created and stewarded by SIL International, and the General Public License (GPL) with the Font Exception clause. The Bitstream Vera and DejaVu families -- surely the most widely used free fonts on linux systems -- use neither of these licenses. Vera uses something like the BSD/MIT license with a clause forbidding commercial distribution of the font by itself (bundling with software distributions that are sold is OK) and requiring derivatives to be named differently from "Vera". These requirements are carried on in DejaVu, with additional changes in DejaVu being in the public domain. A rather sloppy article by LWN standards.
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The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 14, 2010 3:04 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Sorry for the duplicate: due to some caching problems (I guess) it seemed like my previous comment hadn't appeared.
The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 14, 2010 9:26 UTC (Thu) by simosx (subscriber, #24338) [Link]
DejaVu has been the default font for Ubuntu for the last 4+ years!
In addition, DejaVu is the default font for several other distributions that require a free font with wide coverage. DejaVu supports the full Latin, Greek and Cyrillic blocks, which makes it easy to use as a one-font suits all.
Indeed, DejaVu is based on Bitstream Vera. Bitstream released their 'Prima' font as open-source with the name Vera (Prima-vera = Spring in Spanish, see?).
Bitstream Vera (still) only supports Latin and a small part of Latin Extended. The DejaVu team, over the years, added support for the full Latin (+Extended A, B, C, D and Supplement), Greek (+Extended/Polytonic), Cyrillic (+Extended A, B, Supplement) and Georgian Unicode blocks, and also many other blocks (Maths, Symbols). You then multiply these to Sans, Serif and Monospace, and also to Regular, Italics, Bold, Extralight.
The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 14, 2010 14:35 UTC (Thu) by yosch (guest, #4675) [Link]
Yes, no doubt that the Dejavu project and community is amazing and has achieved a lot and thankfully it continues!
But seen from a license proliferation perspective it's less than ideal to have a project and organisation-specific model. The Dejavu license is actually Vera agreement + MIT/X11-like from Arev + public domain (whatever that means)... And the embedding is not explicitly covered...
The OFL has made features of the Vera agreement more generic and reusable across projects and organisations.
The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 14, 2010 17:48 UTC (Thu) by simosx (subscriber, #24338) [Link]
I mentioned earlier what DejaVu has achieved as a project (instead of a critical analysis). As far as I know, DejaVu is one of the few projects that have been publicly developing fonts, and managed to get them added to a variety of distributions and software packages (see at the end of http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Download ).
Indeed there is the issue with the license; DejaVu is stuck with the license that came with Bitstream Vera, and as far as I know there has been no response from Bitsteram/GNOME to relicense Vera to the OFL.
The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 14, 2010 9:42 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
And, in fact, Liberation and DejaVu licensing is incompatible, so they can not be mixed legaly. (which *will* be a problem with the one-of-a-kind license Ubuntu is pushing)
Short-term vs. longer-term Posted Oct 14, 2010 11:41 UTC (Thu) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link] The longer-term desire, and the bigger picture (which Canonical is very kindly underwriting) is for a one-of-many-licence. A licence, or licensing framework that is broadly received and compatible with the goals from across the libre/open font community. Input is greatly valued, because without that input the result might not cater for everybody. Fonts take a very long time to develop, and licensing turns out to take even longer! The Ubuntu Font Licence is therefore very much an interim step—a libre means-to-an-end (release early, release often) for getting the Ubuntu Font Family included in K/Ubuntu 10.10 where it can gain from wider testing. The use of "Ubuntu" in the licence-name will hopefully discourage wider use of the licence by groups who are not setup (copyright assignment is presently required for the Ubuntu Font Family) to transition to other/better/future licences when they become available. Hopefully this background and reasoning is covered in the Ubuntu Font Family Licensing FAQ (but if an area needs expanding please file FAQ suggestions).
Short-term vs. longer-term Posted Oct 14, 2010 11:53 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
"The use of "Ubuntu" in the licence-name will hopefully discourage wider use of the licence by groups who are not setup (copyright assignment is presently required for the Ubuntu Font Family) to transition to other/better/future licences when they become available."
Wouldn't the use of "Ubuntu" in the name of the font discourage wider usage of the font itself even if it is eventually under a recognized free font license? Is that the goal as well?
Use of "Ubuntu" as font name Posted Oct 14, 2010 12:51 UTC (Thu) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link] It's entirely possible, yes; and I filed a bug along those lines some months ago. ...In the opposite direction, it is also possible that use of the font family may eclipse use of the distribution (or even a son-of-Ubuntu-Font-Family, as has been the case with DejaVu):
Use of "Ubuntu" as font name Posted Oct 14, 2010 15:35 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I think if Canonical is interested in the font getting widely used, it needs a vendor and distribution neutral name and free license. Otherwise it is just a non starter and won't useful to the broader community.
Use of "Ubuntu" as font name Posted Oct 14, 2010 17:27 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I'd have to concur with regard to the font name. It's a bit weird how branding is a double-edged sword inside our ecosystem when it comes to project naming.
Though I will say having Ubuntu in the licensing name probably won't stop people from using the license if its a good fit for their needs. Historically that really hasn't worked that way. Didn't stop people from picking up the MIT X11 license and reusing it outside of its original use by MIT. Hasn't stopped people using the BSD license outside of BSD. Hasn't stopped the uptake of the Affero GPL license even though Affero Inc. is a privately held for-profit entity. If this "interim" license hangs around too long.. its not going to be "interim" for other people who pick it up and reuse it...or fork this font into a new project. The forked project won't have to follow Canonical's planned re-licensing. I could take the published font right now...fork it..rename it..and we'd be stuck with the "interim" license terms on something.
What's more disturbing still is the blanket copyright assignment requirement to Canonical for these fonts. Canonical continues to push its copyright assignment agenda. Aaron Siego's comments about how Canonical's assignment policy could be fixed to be more balanced and still provide good-faith re-licensing powers is an important read.
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/09/copyright-assignments-...
Read the comment discussion. You can have a contributor agreement that gives a central authority _limited_ ability to relicense in good-faith without giving them the power to create a proprietary fork of the codebase. Aaron goes to some length explaining how KDE's managing entity does this to balance all interests.
-jef
The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 14, 2010 12:04 UTC (Thu) by yosch (guest, #4675) [Link]
BTW it looks like most font sources for Liberation still have the obscure self-referring EULA in their binary fields left over from the commissioning from Ascender:
License URL:
And the embedding (fsType) is still set to Editable embedding (0x0008) which indicates that they may be embedded in documents, but must only be installed temporarily on the remote system.
Maybe the new Chrom*OS fonts: Arimo, Tinos, Cousine -recently commissioned from the same foundry under OFL - will provide a better alternative than Liberation for font compatibility: http://chromestory.com/2010/09/how-to-get-chrome-os-fonts... ?
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