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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 9:26 UTC (Thu) by simosx (subscriber, #24338)In reply to: The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing by rsidd Parent article: The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing
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.
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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.
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