The reserved-name restriction is on the metadata of the sources Google Fonts derived from the TTF, but when Iooked at an old version of the Google Fonts API website, it just hyperlinked the to the OFL itself. I think a likely scenario is simply that that the site/project structure resulted in folks loosing track of the reserved name requirement over time.
If you look at the author's website, he writes favourably about getting selected by Google Fonts but later complains about websites that remove less-frequently-used characters from his font in violation of the Reserved Name claus. From a quick look at Google's FontForge source files, I don't think they were a culprit on that front in 2010. If anyone knows who the first hand to touch the font for Google Fonts was, it would be great to ask whether those initial 2010 changes (version increment of .001 likely corresponding to optimizations for web and file size without removing characters) were done in coordination with the author. At any rate, my two-cents as someone who is very much not in charge here are that reverting to the exact version of the font currently shipped on the author's website was exactly the right call but that worrying about only having the TTF as both source and binary is unnecessary given that this "binary" was perfectly adequate for Google to use as source for their questionable changes and most likely also the source for the fellow who has extended the font under another name in the TeX community. Regards, Timothy On Wed, 12 Aug 2026, 9:23 am Nathan Willis, <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 10:55 AM Bastian Germann <[email protected]> wrote: > >> To be more specific about the RFN: Have a look at this Debian package's >> copyright file or the https://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html website. >> >> Yes, the googlefonts version does not have it and that is why I suggest >> they are probably violating the license. > > > So, from further reading in the thread, it sounds like you're suggesting > not that Google Fonts merely redistributed an RFN-covered font binary with > a functional difference (which would be an RFN violation), but that > somebody at Google Fonts actually altered the text of the license. That's a > considerably more egregious offense. > > The more plausible explanation is that Google Fonts asked him to remove > the RFN clause as a condition for including it in Google Fonts. That's > consistently been the standard procedure, and back in 2010 Google Fonts was > not doing the whole rebuild-from-source in CI process. > > I haven't been able to find a Wayback Machine link (yet) that first links > to a downloadable binary from the Google Fonts site for comparison. But > considering that Cardo was one of the very first 10-12 fonts on the > service, that's a lot of searching. It might be faster just to ask Google > Fonts people. > > Nate > -- > nathan.p.willis > [email protected] >
