The Open Font License and Reserved Font Names

I feel pretty confident that Khaled was clear on that history, although he didn't go into it in his email (i.e., I think he was just saying LaTeX followed TeX's lead there); but thanks for providing the details. I decided to sidestep the TeX renaming issue because of the peculiarities of TeX's licensing situation/history.

The API-preservation issue is one that probably doesn't affect font projects, although after reading your message, I think maybe font name wrinkles might cause problems for web font services, and that might be similar. Google Web Fonts started introducing some naming rules to account for fonts that exist only in italic style (mostly script fonts), but were not _named_ "Foo Italic." Once users start depending on the name for their API calls, changing it is indeed a big problem.

Not that that's the same thing as the TeX issue; it just got me thinking on a tangent....

Nate