Hi, On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 4:05 AM, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mail...@laposte.net> wrote: > > > Le Lun 6 avril 2009 21:54, Dave Crossland a écrit : > >> A new OSI approved font license is out, the Japanese "IPA Font >> License": >> >> http://opensource.org/licenses/ipafont.html >> >> The OFLB is only going to run with the most popular free font >> licenses, to encourage license consolidation, so I doubt the OFLB will >> accept IFL fonts anyway. > > I doubt anyone but the IPA people will use it, it is overly > restrictive and makes it impractical to use anything but the original > font. It's a very convoluted way to say "free to use but not modify)
Exactly. I am guessing that the story behind this is that there are very few FLOSS Japanese fonts, and the ones clearly available for inclusion in Linux distributions until now are considered unsatisfactory. People have for a long time considered the IPA fonts better, but the vagueness of the original IPA license, available only in Japanese, made it impossible for the vendors to include with Linux distributions. I know that Mike Fabian at SuSE, who happens to know Japanese, tried for a long time to get clarification on the license. So now I guess this newly published IPA Font License in English finally clears the way for inclusion of the IPA fonts in Linux distributions ...