On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 5:04 AM, Nathan Willis wrote:
> So you can do "MyFoundry Baskerville" and just reserve your foundry name
> (which you'd likely have a trademark claim on that you're defending in other
> ways, too). Then "OtherType Baskerville" is explicitly still OK.
After reading the last few mails, it seems to me that RFNs are mainly
about reputation and mainly for individual font designers and
foundries.
I would say, projects with a single copyright holder.
I'd suggest that RFN best practice should be:
Avoid RFNs completely for fonts with a community behind them (like DejaVu).
I have advocated for years to avoid them in general, because the copyleft in the license incentivizes upstream contribution aka forming a community; this is also incentivized by GitHub style version control development.
For foundries and individual font designers concerned about reputation:
* add a deterministic build setup
Always good to do :)
* leave the RFN out of the source
If this can be rephrased as "use a codename instead of the rfn in source" then I like it, but in your example below then one if the reserved names is kept, so I'm confused about what you mean here; do you mean, leave it out of the copyright notice? If so I can't imagine that flying with anyone who intentionally applied an rfn, because then anyone could derive from source without the rfn obligation....
* leave the designer/foundry name out of the font name in the source
I generally require this for Google Fonts anyway, and even deny initials, with a few exceptions for sil and Paratype (pt sans) etc, although I may end up renaming them if the upstream ceases development.
* add a note to the source encouraging people to rename for major forks
Always good to do :)
* add the designer/foundry name to the font name in the binary fonts
* add an RFN of the designer/foundry name *only* in the binary fonts
For example:
"Gentium" in the source
"SIL Gentium" in the SIL-distributed .otf files
RFN of "SIL" in the SIL-distributed .otf files
Font name alias of "Gentium" in the SIL-distributed .otf files
(not sure if this last one is possible?)
Aliasing has to be done in fontconfig; I believe Debian font packages can supply a fontconfig rule, if so then yes
Does that sound plausible?
How can we popularise this and make it best practice?
Any volunteers to talk to designers/foundries?