Re: Font license recommendation
Lars Hellström <Lars.Hellstrom@math.umu.se> writes:
> What license should I use if I want to make a _font_ free software?
If you mean a bitmap font, then it's already free, because bitmap
fonts are not copyrightable (in the US, at any rate; I'm not familiar
with the law everywhere).
If you mean a physical font, the same is also true.
If you mean a programmatic font, then the program is a program, and
you can use whatever free software license you like. So *.mf, for
example, should be licensed under your favorite free software license.
If you mean a bitmap font, like the output of METAFONT, then it's like
any other bitmap font, and it's already free.
Some document formats include programmatic fonts in the document. I
think here the question is whether the combination is font-program
plus text is a single program or not. This comes up if the license
you want is the GPL. It would be bizarre in the extreme, it seems to
me, to regard the combination as a single program (at least, assuming
you don't massively intertwine them). I think this would be a matter
of mere aggregation.
However, note that if the document format distributes font-programs in
something other than source, and you want to use the GPL, you need to
make sure the source gets sent along with the font-program somehow.
(Perhaps the document format has some kind of comment syntax where you
could stash it.)
Thomas
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