Liberations fonts from Red Hat

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

http://www.press.redhat.com/2007/05/09/liberation-fonts/

Red Hat has released Liberation fonts under the GPL+ fonts exception 
license. Liberation fonts are metric equivalent to key Microsoft fonts. 
This is a major milestone and significantly enhances the 
interoperability of documents and content under these Microsoft fonts in 
Linux.

Red Hat has included third party licensed fonts in the 
extras/supplementary channel for this purpose to Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux customers before. Some end users have been building packages with 
the restricted Microsoft core fonts but these have only been only short 
term solutions. What has been provided now closes one of the significant 
usabilit gaps for the Free software world and Fedora out of the box.

The initial font sets include Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters and 
lacks hinting. The next update is planned to have hinting and support 
for other locales.

They are available now in the Fedora 7 Preview Live DVD specially 
created for the Red Hat summit. I believe the plan it to make these 
available in the Fedora repository via the regular review process. Enjoy!

Rahul

[Marc Wiriadisastra]

>  Hi
>
>  http://www.press.redhat.com/2007/05/09/liberation-fonts/
>
>  Red Hat has released Liberation fonts under the GPL+ fonts exception
>  license. Liberation fonts are metric equivalent to key Microsoft fonts.
>  This is a major milestone and significantly enhances the
>  interoperability of documents and content under these Microsoft fonts in
>  Linux.
>
>  Red Hat has included third party licensed fonts in the
>  extras/supplementary channel for this purpose to Red Hat Enterprise
>  Linux customers before. Some end users have been building packages with
>  the restricted Microsoft core fonts but these have only been only short
>  term solutions. What has been provided now closes one of the significant
>  usabilit gaps for the Free software world and Fedora out of the box.
>
>  The initial font sets include Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters and
>  lacks hinting. The next update is planned to have hinting and support
>  for other locales.
>
>  They are available now in the Fedora 7 Preview Live DVD specially
>  created for the Red Hat summit. I believe the plan it to make these
>  available in the Fedora repository via the regular review process. Enjoy!
>
>  Rahul
>  
Credit to Red Hat as always for helping out the community.

Regards,

Marc

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 10 mai 2007 00:34, Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
>  Hi 
Hi Rahul,

>  The initial font sets include Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters
> and
>  lacks hinting. The next update is planned to have hinting and support
>  for other locales. 
This calls for many questions:

1. Is this a long-term Red Hat project or will it go stagnant after
initial funding dries out ? (Luxi and Vera-like)

2. Does Red Hat intend to morph it in a community project (with the
usual wiki+bugzilla+open SCM infrastructure) or will contributions be
restricted to the contracted foundry (ie will it need a fork like Vera
before joining community space ?)

3. what is the reasonning between the licensing choice? Most recent
FLOSS font projects seem to be gravitation towards OFL, and licensing
differences make cross-pollination difficult

4. will unicode coverage ever extend past Latin, Greek and Cyrillic ?
Is Latin, Greek and Cyrillic support limited to most common glyphs or
does it also includes regional variants (welsh, catalan, coptic, etc)

5. is it intended to be the new RHEL or Fedora default font set or
just a windows compatibility pack ?

6. why did Red Hat choose to launch a new font project instead of
improving one of the existing FLOSS fonts? Was metric compatibility
the main reason? If so is it not dangerous to target the windows
2000/XP font set when vista just introduced a new default font set ?

7. why is this discussed on the marketing list first ?

[feel free to redirect answers to whatever forum you feel is most
appropriate]

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

[Nicu Buculei]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>  
>  This calls for many questions:
>  
>  2. Does Red Hat intend to morph it in a community project (with the
>  usual wiki+bugzilla+open SCM infrastructure) or will contributions be
>  restricted to the contracted foundry (ie will it need a fork like Vera
>  before joining community space ?) 
One possibility I see is to work with the Open Font Library 
(unfortunately the website http://openfontlibrary.org/ is down for the 
moment because of some troubles with freedesktop.org)

>  5. is it intended to be the new RHEL or Fedora default font set or
>  just a windows compatibility pack ? 
The linked article seems to suggest it as a future default font.

>  7. why is this discussed on the marketing list first ? 
I guess it was an invitation for people to spread the word about it 
(blogs, digg, news sites).

-- 
nicu :: http://nicubunu.ro :: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com
Cool Fedora wallpapers: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/wallpapers/
Open Clip Art Library: http://www.openclipart.org
my Fedora stuff: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro

[Rahul Sundaram]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>  Le Jeu 10 mai 2007 00:34, Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
> > Hi
>  
>  Hi Rahul,
>  
> > The initial font sets include Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters and
> > lacks hinting. The next update is planned to have hinting and support
> > for other locales.
>  
>  This calls for many questions: 
[I am not involved with this effort in any intimate level nor am I 
anyway an expert in font technology. The contact point for more details 
is Red Hat counsel, Mark Webbink who has been driving this effort. He is 
pretty busy so getting official answers is going to take sometime. I 
will answer these to my best of my knowledge. If you want further 
clarifications I would have to get back to him]

>  1. Is this a long-term Red Hat project or will it go stagnant after
>  initial funding dries out ? (Luxi and Vera-like) 
There is alteast a second update planned as the link says.

>  2. Does Red Hat intend to morph it in a community project (with the
>  usual wiki+bugzilla+open SCM infrastructure) or will contributions be
>  restricted to the contracted foundry (ie will it need a fork like Vera
>  before joining community space ?) 
Whether we can get community contributors depending on the contractual 
obligations between Red Hat and the font vendor doing the work. If a 
fork is necessary we can setup a community space in Fedora at 
hosted.fedoraproject.org and drive that.

>  3. what is the reasonning between the licensing choice? Most recent
>  FLOSS font projects seem to be gravitation towards OFL, and licensing
>  differences make cross-pollination difficult 
GPL+ Fonts exception might be compatible with other font licenses. I 
haven't looked yet. Not sure why this license was chosen.

>  4. will unicode coverage ever extend past Latin, Greek and Cyrillic
> ?
>  Is Latin, Greek and Cyrillic support limited to most common glyphs or
>  does it also includes regional variants (welsh, catalan, coptic, etc) 
I heard there is going to more locale support again based on regions Red 
Hat has customers asking for this.

>  5. is it intended to be the new RHEL or Fedora default font set or
>  just a windows compatibility pack ? 
Compatibility atleast for RHEL. Language coverage is not enough for it 
be the default set. We can make our own decisions in Fedora.

>  6. why did Red Hat choose to launch a new font project instead of
>  improving one of the existing FLOSS fonts? Was metric compatibility
>  the main reason? If so is it not dangerous to target the windows
>  2000/XP font set when vista just introduced a new default font set ? 
Metric compatibility is the main requirement here. There are a inanely 
large of documents that are using these fonts and without metric 
compatibility these documents lose formating. A number of customers 
can't afford that disruption and that is driving the choices here.

Hopefully we can them off this practice before the new vista default set 
in Windows gets popular.

>  7. why is this discussed on the marketing list first ? 
I thought it was pretty important change and Fedora folks should be 
aware of it. I think this is more or less suitable for this list. That's 
all. Not doing it representing the project or in any official capacity.

Rahul

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 10 mai 2007 11:13, Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
>  Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Le Jeu 10 mai 2007 00:34, Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
> >> Hi
> >
> > Hi Rahul,
> >
> >> The initial font sets include Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters
> >> and
> >> lacks hinting. The next update is planned to have hinting and
> >> support
> >> for other locales.
> >
> > This calls for many questions:
>
>  [I am not involved with this effort in any intimate level nor am I
>  anyway an expert in font technology. The contact point for more
>  details
>  is Red Hat counsel, Mark Webbink who has been driving this effort. He
>  is
>  pretty busy so getting official answers is going to take sometime. I
>  will answer these to my best of my knowledge. If you want further
>  clarifications I would have to get back to him] 
I think core fonts are a highly user-visible part of the distribution,
and it would be better if the people @rh behind this project presented
it on fedora-devel before people learn of it through a press release.

This development is probably positive but the communication choices so
far are not too community-oriented (which is a pity since the
licensing choices  imply a community orientation)

I doubt I've exhausted the questions people will want answers to.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

[Rahul Sundaram]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>  I think core fonts are a highly user-visible part of the
> distribution,
>  and it would be better if the people @rh behind this project presented
>  it on fedora-devel before people learn of it through a press release.
>  
>  This development is probably positive but the communication choices so
>  far are not too community-oriented (which is a pity since the
>  licensing choices  imply a community orientation)
>  
>  I doubt I've exhausted the questions people will want answers to. 
This is not a Fedora specific development. When it is introduced in 
Fedora you can ask the development questions to the people involved.

Rahul