On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 7:07 AM, Nicolas Spalinger <nicolas_spalin...@sil.org> wrote: > Ed Trager wrote: >> 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 ... > > And also, AFAIK Hideki Yamane and others from Debian Japan had > translated the license and had various talks over a long period of time > advocating a less restrictive model to IPA so that distros can include > it. We can now see the results of these efforts for all users of the > Japanese writing systems. It's great that IPA saw the benefits :-) > > So in a sense it's great news that they will re-release with a better > license but for the future maintainership of this font family basically > they're stuck in a silo, and I suspect the license might be somewhat of > a barrier to contributors :-( > > OTOH there's the great work of Arne Gotje on CJK fonts which may > well > provide the community with a .jp font family with more > re-usable and community-known licensing.
And also don't forget the work of the WenQuanYi project, http://wenq.org/ But Japanese users may still argue that Gotje's project and the WenQuanYi project are both "Chinese" font projects and that there are stylistic differences among a subset of the Japanese Kanji ... Gotje is addressing the (actually very few ... ) stylistic differences directly using TTC. At this point in time, I'm not sure how or if the WQY project is dealing with the national glyph style differences ... Best - Ed