Please use the OFL for fonts
Closed this issue · 9 comments
The SIL OFL v1.1 is the most popular license for libre fonts, and if metaflop fonts were licensed as OFL then I would use them as a basis for customizing with out font editors. The GPL source provision requirements become so complex that they prevent me from doing so :(
We are still not quite set on the license topic. We chose between the following 3:
- SIL
- GPL
- CC (non commercial)
The reason for choosing the GPL was that we could use the same license for both the source code and the fonts. We don't have very deep knowledge in licensing issues.
What's the problem exactly with the GPL complexity, i.e. what prevents you from using the fonts?
(IANAL)
GPL source provision doesn't make sense for fonts. If I take the fonts from you as the OTF that you provide, and I want to distribute it to someone else, I must provide them with the full corresponding source files. What are they? Its not clear to me at a practical or philosophical level. The OFL avoids this issue by not requiring source provision.
CC-NC licenses are not libre/open source (c.f freedomdefined.org). CC-BY or CC-BY-SA have attribution requirements that are inappropriate for fonts; its nice if you have room to mention the font you're using, in a colophon or such, but often you don't want to be burdened with a requirement for it.
CC-0 can make sense for fonts, since its as close to european-valid public domain as you can get. (Putting things in the PD doesn't work in Europe, its only for the US legal system. In Europe, things only become Public Domain when the copyright expires, like in 1,000 years time... ;-)
The OFL was written by and for type designers who want to promote a free culture of typography. Its got the key part of the GPL - that derivatives must remain libre, the copyleft - and something close to CC-NC in that OFL fonts can't be sold by themselves. This is why almost all libre fonts are under the OFL today, and with designers, the OFL carries the kind of 'brand recognition' that the GPL has with programmers :)
You can make the fonts available under either the GPL or the OFL, and its up to the recipient to pick one or both licenses to apply to their derivatives. That way the code+fonts benefits you see don't change, but people like me can work with the fonts further :)
Meanwhile we are discussing internally...
We decided to make the fonts available under gpl+ofl dual license for now (although I'm not sure if the GPL is of any use any more).
We'll update the licenses on our homepage and in the otf/webfont exports.
Awesome! The copyright string in an OTF I downloaded says,
Copyright (C) 2012 by Metaflop - Simon Egli, Marco Mueller. http://www.metaflop.com. All rights reserved. License: A copy of the End-User License Agreement to this font software can be found online at http://www.metaflop.com.
but the NAME table in the font doesn't contain any license information. I'll chat to Simon about the best way to do this at the weekend, and lot another issue here with concrete suggestions about how to make the license of the downloaded OTFs very clear :)
The new copyright will look like this (it is not on production yet):
Copyright (c) 2013, Simon Egli (http://www.simonegli.com) / Marco Mueller (http://www.marco-mueller.com) / Alexis Reigel (http://www.koffeinfrei.org), Metaflop (http://www.metaflop.com), with Reserved Font Name Bespoke. Dual licensed under the GPL v3 (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) and the OFL v1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL).
For the webfont package we'll include the license text as a separate file.
Don't you think this will do?
What do you mean exactly by the name table?
kalo mina!
On Donnerstag, 31. Januar 2013 22:59:48, Dave Crossland wrote:
Awesome! The copyright string in an OTF I downloaded says,
|Copyright (C) 2012 by Metaflop - Simon Egli, Marco Mueller. http://www.metaflop.com. All rights reserved. License: A copy of the End-User License Agreement to this font software can be found online at http://www.metaflop.com.
|but the NAME table in the font doesn't contain any license
information. I'll chat to Simon about the best way to do this at the
weekend, and lot another issue here with concrete suggestions about
how to make the license of the downloaded OTFs very clear :)—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).
Website and the generated fonts are updated with the new licensing.