Overpass Fonts licensing

[pravin.d.s at gmail.com]

On 6 December 2012 23:42, Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 11:22:18AM +0100, Dave Crossland wrote:
> > Hi Richard and Tom!
> >
> > On 6 December 2012 05:53, Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > In response to a well-articulated request by a developer, Red Hat is
> > > hereby dual-licensing Overpass Fonts[1] under the SIL Open Font
> > > License 1.1 (heretofore the license of the fonts) and the Apache
> > > License 2.0. This shall serve as a general public announcement.
> >
> > Great news!
> >
> > I see that the copyright notice says, "Copyright 2011 Red Hat, Inc.,
> > with Reserved Font Name OVERPASS."
> >
> > Anyone serving the fonts as web fonts under the OFL will need
> > additional permission to distribute it with the RFN because
> > modifications are required in order to convert formats for wide
> > browser compatibility, offer subsets to reduce latency, and so on.
> >
> > The Apache license doesn't have such requirements.
> > Therefore I personally suggest removing the RFN notice.
> >
> > If 'Overpass' is considered a valuable Red Hat trademark, I'd
> > personally suggest declaring trademark notices alongside copyright
> > notices for both licenses.
>
> That may make good sense; let me think about this.
>
> Essentially I think you are saying that the 'Reserved Font Name'
> feature of the SIL OFL is a flaw in practice.
>
> > Personally I don't like Apache for fonts, so I wonder if you might
> > explain about the thinking behind using both licenses.
>
> The reason to continue using SIL OFL is, well, because we've been
> using it (before I joined Red Hat nearly 5 years ago Fedora had
> already declared OFL its recommended font license). And indeed we
> rejoiced in the opportunity to use it in certain cases, Lohit fonts
> and Liberation Fonts 2.0. The latter license change was something I
> personally regarded as a 'liberation', if you will. It is too soon to
> question the legitimacy of such rejoicing. However:
>
> The developer in question, not being previously familiar with the SIL
> OFL, read it and stumbled across the "you may not sell these fonts by
> themselves" clause. He realized the awful truth (although he didn't
> put it this way): there is no way to reconcile SIL OFL being "free"
> and the principle, established by such matters as SunRPC, that a "you
> may not sell this material in isolation" clause is nonfree for a
> software license, unless you either come to an understanding that the
> free software world applies a double standard when it comes to fonts
> vs. software, or you adopt the FSF's "hello world" conceptual trick,
> which I am not entirely comfortable with given that we don't seem to
> have any clear understanding that SIL or the body of SIL licensors
> would see the 'hello world' trick as compliant with the OFL.
>
> Given that realizations of this problem represent an important step
> forward in free culture licensing, and given Red Hat's own
> encouragement of standardization on SIL OFL (which itself has had good
> justifications), and given that Red Hat continues to have copyright
> control over Overpass fonts, it follows that the right thing to do is
> to make these fonts additionally availabe under a license that is
> universally accepted as a free software license.
>
>
Nice explanation Richard.

Lohit is actively used as a Web fonts in some of the projects. Point raised
by Dave is valid one that Web fonts need reproducing/regenerating fonts in
other than .ttf format and RFN requirement make unusable in such case. So
should Lohit upstream consider dropping RFN (reserve font name) requirement
and add it in COPYRIGHT file as suggested by Dave?

ticket for same is already available https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/ticket/8

Regards,
Pravin Satpute
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