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

[Francesco Poli]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:20:30 -0700 (PDT) Walter Landry wrote:

> Nicolas Spalinger <nicolas_spalinger at sil.org> wrote:
> > Hi Walter,
> > 
> > There are obviously varying needs and preferences (prejudices?) along
> > the licensing spectrum but IMHO your reply is very reductive.
> > 
> > At the end of the day upstreams make up their own mind about how they
> > license their own creation but allow me to explain the reasoning of the
> > OFL model a bit more:
> 
> I understand that many font designers want to put in annoying license
> terms.  I really do understand that.  In fact, there are many regular
> software developers who want to put in annoying license terms for
> their programs.  Debian does not encourage these annoying terms for
> programs, and Debian should not encourage annoying terms for fonts
> either.

100 % agreement with Walter, here.

[...]
> > I do agree that GPL-compatibility is great and very desirable but fonts
> > have a different set of requirements corresponding to their special
> > status and usage scenarios.
> 
> Somehow, everyone thinks that they are special and therefore they
> deserve annoying license terms.  We had this debate on debian-legal
> before with the LPPL.  I am sure we will have it again.  I still have
> zero sympathy for this view.

Indeed, this continues to come up again and again: this thing is
special, that one has unusual needs, this is not like normal software
(whatever it may mean...), and so forth. 

[...]
> > and that as an end-user it's tricky to know if you can safely embedd
> > or not without suddenly having to satisfy the GPL requirements for
> > your whole document or not...
> 
> Maybe I am arguing with the wrong person here, but this is an
> education issue, not a legal issue.  That does not make the license
> bad.  Making a good copyleft license is hard.  There are legions of
> people who have made flawed copyleft licenses.  The solution is not to
> make a new license that is incompatible with everything else.

The incompatibility of the OFL with other Free Software licenses is
indeed one of its major issues.

My analysis of the OFL may be found here, BTW:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/03/msg00006.html

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..................................................... Francesco Poli .
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