Help with licensing questions

[Stephen Hartke]

[This message is supposed to continue the thread about licensing questions,
but I just subscribed to the mailing list, so I can't reply directly to
those messages.]
*
From*: Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas mailhot laposte net>*
Subject*: Re: Help with licensing questions*
Date*: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:39:47 +0100

> 12. The author thinking the metatype sources would require him to use
> some other license than the OFL because they look more software-ish is
> just confusing things (pretty common occurrence unfortunately). GPL-ing
> the build scripts would probably be more interesting, but a. they're
> lost and b. this would not change the font licensing at all.

I'm confused by this comment.  My font Aurulent Sans is created by MetaType1
programs that look like this:

%% \--------------------------------------------------------------------
%% The letter n
%% %
%% \PICT{n}
%% \--------------------------------------------------------------------
beginfontglyph("n",ASCII("n"),.83lowwidth,lowsp_vert,lowsp_vert,xht,lowdepth);
x0=x1=leftstemloc; y0=xht; y1=0;
x2=x0; y2=.4[xht,y1];
x4=x41=x5=rightstemloc; y4=.3[xht,y1]; y5=0;
x3=.76[rt x1,lft x4];  % we choose the point to make "hump" farther to the
right so the divot is big.
% However, we have to be careful about bold fonts, so that x3 doesn't go
farther right than the left edge of x4.
top y3=top y31=xht+low_overshoot;
x31=.6[x3,x4]; y41=.75[y4,y3]; % works because the point put in is 1.75

expand_font_stroke.leftstem
  (butt_end(0,1))
  (z0--z1);
pen_stroke_method:=1;
expand_font_stroke.rightstem
  (cut(fix_nib(join_px,join_py,prot),170)(0);
  cut(extreme_angle(x4,px,x3,py,x2,.5))(1);
  butt_end(last))
  (z2{curl .3}..z3{right}..controls z31 and z41..z4{down}--z5);
pen_stroke_method:=0;
path P; P:=rightstem;
P:=smooth_straight_to_curve(P,5);
P:=smooth_curve_to_straight(P,2);
Fill smooth_curve(P);
Fill leftstem;

I think this is a program and very different than the MetaType1 sources for
Latin Modern and similar fonts that contain mainly just tables of data
points.  In that sense, the GPL for the MetaType1 sources seems very
reasonable to me.  Why do you think that it is inappropriate?

> 10. Lastly, font sources in metatype format can be non-trivial to build,
> and seem to require specific build scripts tuned to the TEX variant the
> distro ships. Building any font from metatype would probably require
> help from TEX specialists such as Jonathan Underwood.
>
> 11. In your case the author has lost those scripts, and does not intend
> to work from metatype anymore (preferring direct fontforge editing), so
> it's probably no great loss to forget the original metatype source. Just
> get him to publish an authoritative sfd version of his font, and use it
> as your source.

I have not lost the source for the MetaType1 programs, but rather for the
build scripts.  As you point out, it's tricky to build MetaType1 files, and
I had created files that were particularly tuned to work with teTeX.  I
don't really feel that it is advantageous to recreate these files.  I would
much prefer to work on rewriting the MetaType1 programs using FontForge's
Python scripting.

Best wishes,
Stephen
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