[Pkg-fonts-devel] Merging font teams and share knowledge?

[Ralf Stubner]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 09:17 +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> 
> During the OpenOffice.org conference, I had a very interersting talk
> with Nicolas Spalinger who indeed made me discover the work of the OFL
> fonts packaging team.
[...]
> What do you think about us working out to merge both teams into one?

Sounds like a very good idea.

> For instance, some of the font packages we maintain could be worked to
> adopt the OFL license instead of the probably less well suited GPL or
> LGPL ones. From what I've understood right now, OFL is really meant
> for fonts and can probably make font designers less reluctant to
> release their work as free "software".

The OFL is definitely the best thing to use for fonts which where not
under a free license before. However, if a font is allready under a free
license, I think dual licensing it under OFL and <previous license> is
better. One problem being that there are fonts where it is unlikely that
we will get the license changed. And the OFL is incompatible with
licenses such as GPL.

Real life example: I am currently working on a font that is based on one
of thhe GhostScript fonts (URW Palladio L). So that is GPL plus
embedding clause [1]. Now I would like to have greek characters for this
font as well. The GFS Didot from the Greek Font Society would be a
really good match. Recently the license for this font has been changed
to the OFL. Which is very good indeed, since this font could now be
packaged for Debian. But it still doesn't help me, since I am not
allowed to take any glyphs from this font over into my font ... 

cheerio
ralf

[1] BTW, if you maintain any font package with GPL license, try to get
upstream to add such an embedding clause, preferably the one from the
GPL FAQ.