On 09.08.2012 22:55, Pedro Giffuni wrote:
Of course it's too late for AOO 3.4.1 but Adobe has made available
a new set of free fonts (as in OFL- which we temptatively classified
Category-B)
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/08/source-sans-pro.html
We should probably consider them for inclusion in AOO 3.5.
That is great news, thanks for sharing. They look beautiful.
BTW, I am also aware that Liberation fonts are being rebased on
the Google fonts and released under OFL. Right now there doesn't
seem to be any advantage in switching them but maybe in the future
we should.
Most of the Liberation fonts have been relicensed under the OFL, with
the exception of Liberation Sans Narrow family, which had been
contributed under the restrictive license the other Liberation font
faces were under. Until this is resolved upgrading to the relicensed
version would lose the Liberation Sans Narrow font faces.
As I accidentally have some insight of the problem here are the facts:
- their counterparts were GPL licensed, so they inherited this constraint
- they were produced during work time, so the designer's employer of
that time has the rights to them
- the designer would be happy with relicensing them to a permissive
license but only his ex-employer has the right to do so
Other than that I find it noteworthy that there are a couple of problems
that could have been avoided if a permissive license such as ALv2 had
been used in the first place instead of the much more restrictive
licenses they originally had:
- RedHat found the restrictive license of the Liberation fonts too
constraining and re-licensing cost them quite some effort
- in the Apache OpenOffice project a lot of work had to be done to get
rid of the parts with a restrictive license
- the LibreOffice project has to put in a lot of effort for rebasing
their code base onto Apache OpenOffice to benefit from the more
permissive license there and to allow easier access to upstream patches
- the Liberation Sans Narrow fonts cannot be relicensed unless they are
granted by the designer's employer of the time he worked on them
Herbert
