Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization [LWN.net]

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 19, 2012 21:17 UTC (Tue) by mstefani (guest, #31644) [Link] (1 responses)

It is there in the 2nd paragraph:
"In 2010, Oracle donated a fourth typeface to Liberation: Liberation Sans Narrow, which was designed to be metric-compatible with Arial Narrow."

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 19, 2012 22:06 UTC (Tue) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

Ah yes. My bad.

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 19, 2012 21:42 UTC (Tue) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]

Sans Narrow would be a new face, not a new script. Interestingly enough, it is true that there doesn't seem to be a narrow equivalent from Croscore, so the question remains whether it would be less time-consuming to get an OFL-licensed version of Sans Narrow donated then add the new scripts, or take the regular-width from Croscore and tighten up its belt.

Nate

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 20, 2012 5:19 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (10 responses)

Which shows another problem of custom non-standard licenses: good luck finding anyone at Oracle willing to relicense Narrow now they got rid of OpenOffice.

So Narrow is likely to be a casualty of the rebasing (it's missing Google-side)

And BTW while the OFL is a nice BSD-ish license, it's not making consensus now because everyone wants a BSD-ish licence for fonts, but because the FSF never bothered to write a good font copyleft license resulting in painful experiments like the font exception or the liberation license.

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 20, 2012 16:46 UTC (Wed) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (9 responses)

> Which shows another problem of custom non-standard licenses: good
> luck finding anyone at Oracle willing to relicense Narrow now they
> got rid of OpenOffice.

I'm the last person to defend the Liberation Fonts license, but the
problem you refer to has nothing too much to do with whether a license
is standard or not. It would exist even if Liberation Fonts had been
under vanilla GPLv2 + GNU font-embedding exception.

It does have something to do with whether the font license is copyleft
or not. As to that, though, you say:

> the OFL is a nice BSD-ish license, it's not making consensus now
> because everyone wants a BSD-ish licence for fonts, but because the
> FSF never bothered to write a good font copyleft license resulting
> in painful experiments like the font exception or the liberation
> license.

I don't understand the basis for describing the OFL as "BSD-ish". It's
actually a copyleft font license. See clause 5.

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 20, 2012 19:24 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (8 responses)

> I'm the last person to defend the Liberation Fonts license, but the
> problem you refer to has nothing too much to do with whether a license
> is standard or not.

Of course it has. Standard licenses have well-known relicensing effects and you have a pool of other projects with compatible licensing to cross-pollinate with without involving lawyers. Projects with non standard licenses often end up like liberation : no other projects to draw on, few contributors willing to touch it (who wants his contributions shackled by terms that prevent future re-use), no other project you can contribute to without license poisoning (either because terms are incompatible with other licenses or because they would burden other projects with terms they don't want)

Even dejavu despite its own success remains alone and hampered by Vera's one-of-a-kind (if liberal) license. The few non-standard clauses make it impossible to integrate Vera glyphs in other FLOSS fonts without compromising their own OFL or GPL with font exception license (and good latin blocks are in high demand by creators of fonts for more exotic scripts)

If Liberation had used a safe standard license no one would need to ask Oracle today to relicense Liberation Narrow to extend its life.

> I don't understand the basis for describing the OFL as "BSD-ish". It's
> actually a copyleft font license. See clause 5.

It's a very weak copyleft, sources are not defined (so it's ok to reconstruct a font project from the produced binary font file, and to hoard the actual work files that the font editor uses), the naming and no-advertising clauses are definitely BSD-like

Which is not to say the OFL is a bad license, just that it's a lot weaker than the GPL is for software, and many would have been more comfortable with a stronger license if it was available for fonts (GPL with font exception does not really count as it's hard to understand in a font context by someone with no free software background, and causes no end of administrative problems if any link in the release process forgets to reaffirm this exception)

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 20, 2012 19:31 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (4 responses)

And to complete: any project with non-standard licensing will be converted to a standard license sooner than later if possible just to benefit from the legal certainty of audited terms will well-known effects and because no project member likes having to explain how his license works to every passerby (the exception being if the project member is a lawyer — lawyers love licenses and having to discuss them. Non lawyers would like to forget the subject exists).

Any project which could not follow this process suffers from everything I explained before.

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 20, 2012 21:16 UTC (Wed) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (3 responses)

> (the exception being if the project member is a lawyer — lawyers
> love licenses and having to discuss them. Non lawyers would like to
> forget the subject exists).

I would just like to point out that not all lawyers are bad. :-)

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 21, 2012 5:42 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

I didn't write they were (I hope :))

(offtopic) ELAW

Posted Jun 28, 2012 10:26 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] (1 responses)

Let me help you.

They mostly are unfortunately: the very approach of substituting natural human conscience with synthetic piles of buggy legal code tends to twist the very perception of basic concepts like truth and false.

And yes, we can still make such statements without fearing to catch a nice lawsuit -- freedom is still here; from Russia (actually Ukraine) with love :)

(offtopic) ELAW

Posted Jul 10, 2012 1:16 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

Natural human conscience is wonderful, until you start to get into questions about whether we should or shouldn't kill witches, whether it's okay to copy a new movie (what if it's 50 years old? How about 100?), when we said we were making this software free, did we really mean people could sell it (okay, but that didn't mean Microsoft? Okay, but it's only fair that we have access to their changes, isn't it? We didn't make this software so people could make baby mulchers with it!)

Making agreed upon contracts, whether for everyone or only for a small group, about what may or may not be done is the only way to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 20, 2012 21:14 UTC (Wed) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (2 responses)

> Standard licenses have well-known relicensing effects and you have a
> pool of other projects with compatible licensing to cross-pollinate
> with without involving lawyers.

Agreed (though is that point so applicable to font projects?).

> Projects with non standard licenses often end up like liberation :
> no other projects to draw on, few contributors willing to touch it
> (who wants his contributions shackled by terms that prevent future
> re-use), no other project you can contribute to without license
> poisoning (either because terms are incompatible with other licenses
> or because they would burden other projects with terms they don't
> want)
>
> If Liberation had used a safe standard license no one would
> need to ask Oracle today to relicense Liberation Narrow to extend
> its life.

There's no "end of life" for Liberation Narrow. It can continue on
under the Liberation Fonts license, as it has done for two years, in
the worst case. (I am actually hopeful that there could be some way
for Oracle to effectively relicense Liberation Narrow under SIL OFL.)

I now see the point you're making, which assumes that even GPL +
font-embedding-exception is a problematically nonstandard license with
bad effects on potential contributor community development. I suppose
I can agree with that. We relicensed the Lohit fonts, a somewhat
parallel situation to Liberation Fonts but not quite so bad, from
GPLv2 + font-embedding-exception to SIL OFL, and one of the
motivations for doing so from the project maintainers' perspective was
to expand at least the user community for the fonts. Our friends at
Google helped us out in this effort.

The correct conclusion may indeed be that no amount of legitimate and
well-intended addition of permissions atop GPL will yield a good font
license.

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 21, 2012 5:50 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

>> Standard licenses have well-known relicensing effects and you have a
>> pool of other projects with compatible licensing to cross-pollinate
>> with without involving lawyers.

> Agreed (though is that point so applicable to font projects?).

It is very applicable — most free and open font authors will focus on their own native script, so producing fonts that work in a globalized context requires sharing between works what started as separate projects.

Ghostscript fonts, Vera, etc have been reused multiple times (and show up as licensing problems in new fonts regularly since their licensing is not as clean as new from-scratch projects)

Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 21, 2012 5:53 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> The correct conclusion may indeed be that no amount of legitimate and
> well-intended addition of permissions atop GPL will yield a good font
> license.

The GPL intent could be declined in a new font-oriented license, but just adding new clauses won't work. OFL was successful because it was a license rewrite targeting fonts explicitly, with short and easy-to-understand terms.