[Pkg-fonts-devel] Talking with an upstream about changing his license

[Rogério Brito]

Dear Nicolas, Christian and other people from the team,

On Mar 03 2010, Nicolas Spalinger wrote:
> Rogério Brito wrote:
> > With that said, what would be a recommended course of action here?
> 
> As Christian has already indicated, ongoing advocacy with upstream can
> be very useful for everyone and is worth doing.

I am still trying to contact him. Unfortunately, I have not heard back
since that time. I guess that I can just ping him again. :-(

> In my experience making the effort to explain to upstreams the benefits
> in using a recognized DFSG-compliant license for their creation
> (reformulating the jargon and the release best practises in a friendly
> way) is usually well-received.

I did that (rephrasing the jargon) and I think that my text was not that
bad.  Perhaps some parts of it could be a basis for a template for the
fonts team (if that is desired, of course)? Doing this kind of legwork
is an unrewarded task, but necessary, nonetheless.

> I recommend you send your upstream the following links:
> http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Open_Font_License
> http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web

OK, I did that.

> It should provide enough material to cover questions or concerns
> upstreams could have about releasing their creation as open fonts.

It seemed to me that, basically, the worries were about commercial use
of the font and distribution getting out of hand. I had some paragraphs
regarding that in my e-mail to the upstream.

> Let us know how it goes.

Well, this is a brief status update on the issue.


Thanks, Rogério Brito.

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