[Pkg-fonts-devel] Open Font License 1.1-review2 available

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Hello everyone,

This announcement sent to OFL-discuss will probably be of interest to
members of our font packaging team:


OFL-1.1-review2 is now available.

We have taken into account much of the feedback we received on the
original OFL 1.0, as well as OFL-1.1-review1, and have now written
OFL-1.1-review2. These revisions do not change the actual intent of the
license - they just clarify how the intent is expressed and fix some
possible ambiguities or problematic scenarios which have been flagged up
by the reviewers.

You will find the new OFL-1.1-review2, the diff against the previous
OFL-1.1-review1, a summary of the changes as well as an updated FAQ -
along with the corresponding diff - at http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_review

Please look at this new review version as soon as possible and give us
your feedback via the OFL-discuss mailing list. Because this is likely
to be the final stage of review, and because we want to get version 1.1
out soon, we're asking for your feedback before December 8.

As you are probably aware, various font-related BoFs and presentations
have taken place at FLOSS conferences this year (like the Libre Graphics
Meeting, the Ubuntu Summit, the GUADEC, the AKademy) to discuss what
would be needed to improve the font landscape on the free desktop. One
key aspect was appropriate licensing of the fonts, flexibility to
maintain and branch fonts without breaking rendering, interoperability
across distributions, and the definition of a core set of fonts with
recognized glyph quality, sufficient Unicode coverage and a good
community-recognized license. The OFL has been recognised by many
contributors to these discussions as a good solution to these issues.

Following on from these meetings, the discussion has continued via the
freedesktop.org initiative. Various IRC discussions have been held on
topics related to fonts on the #freedesktop and ##fonts channels on
irc.freenode.org. This has lead to a presentation of the OFL, its
working model and its current rate of adoption in the FLOSS community as
part of the TextLayoutSummit in Boston (as part of the GNOME Summit)
where it has been well received by key maintainers and contributors in
the area of writing systems components on the free desktop.

The goals of the OFL and its methodology have also been presented and
discussed at the AtypI annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal, the most
important international gathering of the Type community.

Over the past months various new font families have been released under
OFL and there is now a campaign coordinated by Unifont.org with
sponsorship of various key organisations in the FLOSS community to
encourage more designers to consider choosing the OFL for their font
projects. Representatives of the GNOME board are in contact with
Bitstream to get a re-release of Vera under OFL and the Dejavu team is
seriously considering the OFL too.

The OpenFontLibrary is also gathering momentum to encourage designers to
do collaborative open font design using this community-recognized
license, to improve the free toolkit available and to make their work
more widely known to others. See the OpenFontLibrary wiki for a summary
of the discussions.

So, things are seriously moving ahead for free/open font these days and
we're confident the clarifications brought by a final OFL 1.1 will be a
big help in the efforts to make it easier for designers to collaborate
on font design, to improve the overall font landscape and enable more
languages - no matter how complex their script - to be fully supported
on the free desktop.

Looking forward to your feedback,


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
http://scripts.sil.org