Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Expat License
Le dimanche 16 novembre 2008 à 18:16 -0600, Karl Berry a écrit : > Since it has an advertising clause, it's kinda like the unmodified BSD > license. > > Wrong. Expat (and many other licenses) say that a certain name must > *not* be used in advertising. That is ok. The unmodified BSD was > GPL-incompatible because it said a certain name must actively *be* used, > which constitutes a "further restriction". The passive "name must not > be used" does not. Some people deem that even writing in DejaVu description that it is a derivative of Bitstream Vera is forbidden by such "passive" rules. I don't like them much. Mentioning a font history and original designer should not be so dangerous. -- Nicolas Mailhot signature.asc Description: Ceci est une partie de message numériquement signée
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] wiki to spanish
El Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:30:50 + "Dave Crossland" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> escribió: > 2008/11/14 minombresbond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > > I would like to contribute with the translation of some section of > > the ofl wiki to spanish, How can I do? > > sorry if the answer is already on the wiki! > > The pages in this list would be ideal! :-) > > http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/OFLB_TODO_list#Copywriting ok, thanks
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] [Openfontlibrary] Fonts are software, so use a software license.
Christopher Fynn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I don't know about the US but if you publish a font in the UK, or > another European country, I think you may want something more than a > license designed for software. This should also apply to licenses for > free/open source fonts. No, a license designed for software seems fine to me in the UK. As I understand it, the big distinction in CDPA is between programs and other literary works, not between software and hardcopy works. -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Expat License
Since it has an advertising clause, it's kinda like the unmodified BSD license. Wrong. Expat (and many other licenses) say that a certain name must *not* be used in advertising. That is ok. The unmodified BSD was GPL-incompatible because it said a certain name must actively *be* used, which constitutes a "further restriction". The passive "name must not be used" does not. Read the GPL FAQ and license-list for more details. karl
[OpenFontLibrary] Licenses
> DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE >Version 2, December 2004 > >Copyright (C) 2004 Your Name >Your, Address, Some, Place, Nice. >Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified >copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long >as the name is changed. > >DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE > TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION > >0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO. >--- 8< > >I think that could *appeal* to a young 'designer' part of our >potential community/"audience". But could put off older, gentler, >parts, so maybe not best. To be taken seriously, we can't allow a license with swearing in it. I hate sounding like some conservative (which i'm not), but it's just a bad idea. **Get the Moviefone Toolbar. Showtimes, theaters, movie news & more!(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/10075x1212774565x1200812037/aol?redir=htt p://toolbar.aol.com/moviefone/download.html?ncid=emlcntusdown0001)
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Expat License
On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 15:06 +0100, Nicolas Spalinger wrote: [Dave Crossland wrote:] > > "Public Domain" is recognised in every day language. > > In which language, in which jurisdiction? To mean what exactly? To put this another way (and I have very limited exposure to international copyright law and to Conflict of Laws, for example, and no formal legal training), saying Public Domain is a recognised term everywhere is a bit like saying every programming language has a "string" data type. That's fine for a non-programmer (even if not strictly true) but, 7-bit or 8-bit or 16-bit or 32-bit characters, is NUL allowed, fixed length or variable, bounds checking, etc etc., programmers immediately have lots of questions, and don't see FORTRAN 7-bit fixed-length strings as the same as Java 16-bit variable-length strings, for example. The people I've spoken with (although not about fonts) have considered "public domain" to be so different just between Canada and the US that they've said Canada doesn't have public domain, it has something entirely different, even though to you and I it's pretty darn similar. Since most people don't understand the differences between "copyrighted and zero dollars" and "rights waived" and "public domain", at the very least a clear explanation should be used (I can try to help draft one, but copyright layers from at least the UK, US, Canada, France, and at least one of Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, would be needed to have any clear certainty. Heck we can't even be sure between us what typeface protection there is in the UK, and the laws are online in (legal) English! :-) But even an incomplete statement may help. I'd really, really prefer to see OFL used. And of course, you could take any font published in the US as "public domain" and re-issue it ass OFL, with or without the consent of the designer, at least as long as you can clearly demonstrate (1) that it was published under such terms, and (2) that it is not itself a derivative work... (sort of what was done with pdtar to make gnu tar, stripping off the author's name and republishing under a new license, although of course he never again released source for anything he wrote). > The problems with PD are all > > theoretical problems that have not yet effected anyone, as far as I > > know. They are not theoretical, they are real. > > I have one suggestion: We could use the "Do What The Fuck You Want To > > Public License" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL This would not work in Canada, and I think also not in the UK (unless the GPL also works there today; it used not to, unless you paid actual money for the software, so that contract law could be invoked). You're welcome to use my barefoot license, people have to go without footwear for a day within a week of first using the font :-) Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Design service blog
Le dimanche 16 novembre 2008 à 18:10 +0100, Jeremy Schorderet a écrit : > hi all Hi Jeremy > i put up a blog 2 weeks ago to open discussions on my semester project. > (the creation of an original typeface for the open font library) Quite honestly if you insist on posting about a blog without giving its address I doubt you'll get much feedback. > i haven't had much feedback… > but that's why it is online! and that's also why i adressed to you > people. > > take a look and share thoughts / references… I'd say we've all seen fonts that never went past ASCII support and are therefore mightily useless for most people in the world (since even most latin scripts need more than just ASCII, English is pretty much an exception). The lack of feedback is probably the indifference/horror most of us feel towards creating one other such font (we don't expect you to create much more in a semester). If you want to make a difference do select an *existing* font and work with its author to expand in coverage. For example, take one promising font and make it MES-1/2/3 compliant http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/cwa13873.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/mes-2-rationale.html Examples of fonts to complete would be — Edrip ftp://ftp.dvo.ru/pub/Font/edrip/ — Heuristica ftp://ftp.dvo.ru/pub/Font/heuristica/ Or if you're feeling ambitious – DejaVu http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/ — Liberation https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/ But you can pretty much take any ASCII-limited font and make it useful for *many* other people just by incresing its coverage. (but do remember to get native speakers as reviewers of your glyphs, posting to relevant translation groups should find you some) If you want to make something totaly new, create a latin-arabic font in fontorge using BASE tables. I hear the pango maintainer would love an example of such a font to start implementing base support. http://www.microsoft.com/OpenType/OTSpec/BASE.htm > (it sucks to be asking though) Well sometimes you get the answers you want, sometimes you get the answers you don't want, sometimes you get nothing. That's real-world human interactions for you, school is about the only place where you're guaranteed answers in time. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot signature.asc Description: Ceci est une partie de message numériquement signée
[OpenFontLibrary] Design service blog
hi all i put up a blog 2 weeks ago to open discussions on my semester project. (the creation of an original typeface for the open font library) i haven't had much feedback… but that's why it is online! and that's also why i adressed to you people. take a look and share thoughts / references… (it sucks to be asking though) jeremy Jeremy Schorderet – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 8, chemin de l'Esparcette 1023 Crissier – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 076.507.23.30
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Expat License
Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > Personally, I used to think OFL everywhere would be the future, but I've > come to realise its non-copyleft orientation and all its > renaming/fontlog requirements would never make it acceptable for a large > number of the font projects I follow. Let me point out that the Reserved Font Names are not mandatory (only highly recommended): you can use the OFL and not reserve any names. (up to you to handle the consecutive chaos but that's another story). And the FONTLOG is recommended but not a requirement. I don't see why you'd think that being more descriptive about your font design process and crediting various contributors (with something like a FONTLOG) would be seen as a bad thing by people with a FLOSS culture... Rather the opposite I'd say. George Williams has added a FONTLOG-like field in the sfd format for example. I suspect we'll even go futher down this route with more DVCS usage with commit logs by designers. As for the weak copyleft, it's a design feature. But we recommend as much extended sources as possible. I'm pretty sure you are aware that many FLOSS folks recognize the value of that model and even non-copyleft licenses. > In other words the OFL bent backwards too much to please some font > designers and would never be recognized by free software folks as > codifying their ideal (and free software folks are a major force when > creating i18n fonts that cover scripts with little commercial appeal is > needed). There had to be a satisfactory nexus, a bridge between communities for something to happen. Look at it this way: how many original font designs have become part of distro archives since the OFL was community-reviewed and published compared to the previous years? The majority of libre fonts were maintainership of foundry donations. Thankfully this is now changing. If both communities stayed on their side of the fence what practical benefits would there have been for the end-user? Especially the ones using complex but lesser-known scripts (sometime yet-to-be-studied-and-drawn) as you rightly point out. Various major free software community bodies have already recognized and welcomed the OFL model. > So if I had a stake in OFLB (and I haven't, I contributed zip to this > particular project so far) Well I'd say your work in packaging fonts uploaded to the library is already extremely beneficial :-) > I'd insist the OFLB recommended font > shortlist to consist at least of > – the OFL > – GPL with font exception (reworked as cleanly as possible with the > FSF), or LGPL IMHO LGPL (2 & 3) is pretty hard to parse and understand in the context of fonts... > — a very permissive PD-like license (ie PD done right, an actual text > granting various rights) Something with attribution but all other rights granted. > And as for some of those licenses not being well-known by typeface > designers ⇒ this is part of OFLB evangelism role, and given the > craptastic licenses I see everyday attached to web fonts it's much > needed. > > This would avoid future Droid/Liberation/STIX licensing hell > repetitions. Indeed, I totally agree. Recommending a limited set is beneficial for all. -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Expat License
> The "positioning" of our recommended licenses is crucial. I think > overtly we only recommend the OFL, but on the upload form we have 4 > license choices: "a free license (moderation)" "OFL" "$permissive > license" "GPL-OFLB-style" > > I think all these funny named licenses mean nothing to most type > designers, so they should not be used. I agree that there's a need to explain them and their use cases but having the submission form hide from the submitter the actual name and terms of the license they are releasing under is at best abuse of trust. IMHO not what the project wants. > "Public Domain" is recognised in every day language. In which language, in which jurisdiction? To mean what exactly? > It is what we have today. I think there is a strong case for keeping it - > unless > something concrete happens with "authors rights" being retracted in > the whole wide free software community. The problems with PD are all > theoretical problems that have not yet effected anyone, as far as I > know. I don't think they're all that theoretical... Why would distro legal teams spend so much time discussing the problems and advocate to upstreams that they clarify their statements? Why would Creative Commons try to come up with something better? > Perhaps when CC-Zero comes out, we can switch to that. That would be > good, CC has a lot of recognition and referring to them helps widen > recognition of the whole free culture thing. But the Non Commercial CC > licenses are a bit iffy, if we recommend CC too much, we might get > CC-NC fonts appearing in the moderation queue. Remember that there is the issue that CC are licenses designed for content and not software. I agree that we don't want NC for font software. > I have one suggestion: We could use the "Do What The Fuck You Want To > Public License" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL > > --- 8< >DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE >Version 2, December 2004 > > Copyright (C) 2004 Your Name > Your, Address, Some, Place, Nice. > Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified > copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long > as the name is changed. > >DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE > TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION > > 0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO. > --- 8< > > I think that could *appeal* to a young 'designer' part of our > potential community/"audience". But could put off older, gentler, > parts, so maybe not best. Well, if we're going down the route of silly licenses, I recommend instead the Beerware license from phk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware Much more code released under that license and attribution is still kept: you really want to know who you're having a chat over a drink with :-) -- Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer http://planet.open-fonts.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Expat License
Personally, I used to think OFL everywhere would be the future, but I've come to realise its non-copyleft orientation and all its renaming/fontlog requirements would never make it acceptable for a large number of the font projects I follow. In other words the OFL bent backwards too much to please some font designers and would never be recognized by free software folks as codifying their ideal (and free software folks are a major force when creating i18n fonts that cover scripts with little commercial appeal is needed). So if I had a stake in OFLB (and I haven't, I contributed zip to this particular project so far), I'd insist the OFLB recommended font shortlist to consist at least of – the OFL – GPL with font exception (reworked as cleanly as possible with the FSF), or LGPL — a very permissive PD-like license (ie PD done right, an actual text granting various rights) And as for some of those licenses not being well-known by typeface designers ⇒ this is part of OFLB evangelism role, and given the craptastic licenses I see everyday attached to web fonts it's much needed. This would avoid future Droid/Liberation/STIX licensing hell repetitions. -- Nicolas Mailhot signature.asc Description: Ceci est une partie de message numériquement signée
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Expat License
2008/11/16 Dave Crossland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > I think that could *appeal* to a young 'designer' part of our > potential community/"audience". But could put off older, gentler, > parts, so maybe not best. Actually, much better, I suggest we use this: > DO WHAT YOU WANT TO FONT LICENSE > Version 1, December 2008 > > Copyright (C) 2008 Your Name > Your, Address, Some, Place, Nice. > Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified > copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long > as the name is changed. > > DO WHAT YOU WANT TO FONT LICENSE > TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION > > 0. You just DO WHAT YOU WANT TO.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Expat License
2008/11/16 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >>- MIT/X11/Expat (much better than PD) >> >>As long as we're being dogmatic, I think we should recommend Expat and >>not mention MIT, X11, modified BSD, ISC, etc., etc. Expat is the only >>one of that family which has an unambiguous name and meaning. (Again, >>that does not actively rejecting a font using mBSD.) I think if we want to be all permissive, we should (a) decide to accept any permissive FS license as policy (I think this is "DONE" :-) (b) decide to put anything other than the recommended all permissive license in the moderation queue (I think this is "DONE" but I'm less sure) (c) decide what our "default" all permissive license should be. The "positioning" of our recommended licenses is crucial. I think overtly we only recommend the OFL, but on the upload form we have 4 license choices: "a free license (moderation)" "OFL" "$permissive license" "GPL-OFLB-style" I think all these funny named licenses mean nothing to most type designers, so they should not be used. "Public Domain" is recognised in every day language. It is what we have today. I think there is a strong case for keeping it - unless something concrete happens with "authors rights" being retracted in the whole wide free software community. The problems with PD are all theoretical problems that have not yet effected anyone, as far as I know. Perhaps when CC-Zero comes out, we can switch to that. That would be good, CC has a lot of recognition and referring to them helps widen recognition of the whole free culture thing. But the Non Commercial CC licenses are a bit iffy, if we recommend CC too much, we might get CC-NC fonts appearing in the moderation queue. I have one suggestion: We could use the "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL --- 8< DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, December 2004 Copyright (C) 2004 Your Name Your, Address, Some, Place, Nice. Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed. DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION 0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO. --- 8< I think that could *appeal* to a young 'designer' part of our potential community/"audience". But could put off older, gentler, parts, so maybe not best.
