The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing [LWN.net]

The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing

Posted Oct 14, 2010 14:35 UTC (Thu) by yosch (guest, #4675)
In reply to: The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing by simosx
Parent article: The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing

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.

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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.