Re: [Pkg-fonts-devel] About the licensing of URW Garamond No. 8

[Walter Landry <wlandry@caltech.edu>]

Nicolas Spalinger <nicolas_spalinger@sil.org> wrote:
> Paul Wise wrote:
>> I'd strongly suggest to indicate a preference about which license you
>> would like them to choose.
>> 
>> I would personally suggest standard FLOSS licenses like BSD,
>> MIT/Expat, ISC, GPL + font exception etc. If those aren't acceptable,
>> the SIL OFL is a DFSG-compatible compromise between font foundry needs
>> and free software principles.
> 
> Yes! Recommending a particular validated model and explaining how it
> will benefit both upstream and downstream is much more effective in such
> advocacy efforts.
> 
> I recommend you take advantage of the campaign resources on
> http://www.unifont.org/go_for_ofl/
> 
> Considering how various key Libre Software communities have given their
> support to the licensing model it seems like a good model to recommend
> to URW. Various fonts in CTAN are under OFL as well.

Please do not recommend the OFL.  Legally requiring a name change is
unfriendly and subject to abuse.  Not allowing a font to be sold by
itself is a useless countermeasure.  It is GPL-incompatible to boot.
As someone who just recently needed a GPL compatible font, it was
quite annoying trying to find one.

Also, I found this page

  http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Font_Licensing

which mentions

  Despite the problems, the base 35 PostScript fonts donated by URW++
  to (originally) the Ghostscript project are licensed under the GPL,
  with an exception similar to the font above.

But then I found this page

  http://www.advogato.org/person/raph/diary/257.html

which says

  By the way, URW did not donate these fonts under the GPL out of
  their own hearts. Artifex paid good money for them, and donated them
  out of a mix of self-interest and altruism.

So is may be easy to change the license to GPL, but you may want to
talk to Artifex, not URW++.

> Hopefully your advocacy efforts will benefit many people throughout the
> communities. Thanks! Let us know how it goes.
> 
> BTW the font exception for the GPL still has a bunch of unsolved
> problems. I wouldn't recommend that.

What are these problems?  A quick search yielded nothing.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@caltech.edu