The Open Font License and Reserved Font Names

Posted Jun 3, 2013 10:00 UTC (Mon) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033)
Parent article: The Open Font License and Reserved Font Names

Doesn't open-source already voluntarily do something very similar? Version numbers. The foo developers don't ship one nd only one true foo. They ship foo-0.1, -0.2, -1.0, ... quite often with minor release numbers as well, -1.0_nnn say. If you take the source and patch it to better meet your requirements, you are being extremely rude if you don't change the version so that it can't be confused with an official release (and then you may work on the upstream developers to try to get them to merge your mods into a subsequent official release, so you don't have to maintain a fork in perpetuity.

So is it really bad to require a rename? Just as long as the rename is allowed to make clear the ancestry rather than hide it. XYZ_Sans_1.0 -> XYZ_Sans_1.1 (by original designer) -> XYZ_Sans_1.1-ABCpatch1 (modified slightly by ABC, who doesn't wish to suggest it's anything other than a trivial redesign of a couple of glyphs in XYZ's work).

The Open Font License and Reserved Font Names

Posted Jun 3, 2013 21:59 UTC (Mon) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]

The RFN clause requires that you not use XYZ_Sans at all in your renamed version. As with the other concerns, it's not that anyone thinks the concept of renaming is bad, it's the specifics of how it is written into the OFL 1.1.

And, of course, since RFNs are optional, naturally many people as themselves if they can achieve the desired outcome (useful renaming) through other means. If RFNs were mandatory, that wouldn't even be possible.

Nate