Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

Posted Jun 20, 2012 21:14 UTC (Wed) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
In reply to: Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization by nim-nim
Parent article: Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

> 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.