2009/2/15 Stephen Hartke <hartke@xxxxxxxxx>: > > I think that the license of my font _should_ be driven by the format, It seems that when the format "source files" of a font are "source code" then this triggers an automatic, hypnotic, response to use the GPL. However, licensing is really a political choice, not a technical one; which is to say, license choices are driven by politics. IMHO, AIUI, the OFL is intended for designers who don't want to deal with the complexity of the GPL and are new to free software; but if you are convinced that sources ought to be available and your font ought to always remain free, and you don't mind providing sources, then the OFL seems a strange choice to me. You get the ability to remix the font with other OFL fonts, but I'm not sure how useful that is in practice. > If someone makes a derivative font by modifying the sources and distributes > it, then I want them to be required to distribute their modified sources, > just as the GPL requires. It doesn't seem to me that the OFL would require > this. OFL doesn't require sources, it just recommends them. This means OFL fonts can be proprietorised; for example, they can be pushed through a program like superpolator.com (proprietary Mac OS X tool) to extend them, but the interpolation masters are not required to be distributed with the font, nor are formats required to be transparent/freely available. GPLv3 fixes these problems. > If however someone modifies the OTF file directly using FontForge, then > using the GPL is rather nonsensical since there is no source. In that case, > the OFL seems to be the perfect license. > > I don't see how either license by itself accomplishes my goals. Dual licensing is not very good for downstream users, because they fork the project when a downstream only uses one of the licenses. I think GPL+FontException (and a contact details so you can be contacted when a better "Font GPL" is prepared) is the best thing for this project. -- Regards, Dave _______________________________________________ Fedora-fonts-list mailing list Fedora-fonts-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-fonts-list
