[Lohit-devel-list] ~OT: Publishing a font under the GPL

[Dave Crossland]

Hi.

IANAL but I spent a lot of time with libre font licenses :)

You can't REQUIRE anything; the GPL says others can ignore any
additional requirements, and the OFL says it invalidates the license
(I think)

The GPL for fonts is tricky because its unclear what the 'preferred
form of modification' means in practice.

I suggest using the SIL OFL. The benefits of a particular form of
modification don't outweigh the complexity, or the inability to mix
with the large OFL pool - network effects are powerful and important
in my opinion :)

Cheers
Dave

On 21 July 2011 18:19, Bernard Massot <bmassot at free.fr> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 05:38:14PM +0530, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
>> BTW another question: while GPL/OFL permit commercial usage of the
>> font and we are fine by that, would it be possible for us to
>> request/require being credited in such a publication using the font?
> I think you can use the GPL or OFL license as a basis and just add a
> paragraph about the restriction you want to apply. I believe this
> restriction wouldn't make your license a non-free license.
> See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException as both a
> good point to note if you want to you use GPL and an example of how to
> extend GPL.
>
> On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:22:04AM +0530, pravin.d.s at gmail.com wrote:
>> On 19 July 2011 17:38, Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Isn't releasing a font as a TTF sufficient for placing it under the GPL? I
>> > mean, a TTF font can be directly edited without much trouble unlike compiled
>> > C-code, right?
>>
>> Nope ttf is binary file. for GPL one required source so one can provide
>> patches and updates.
> TTF is binary as in "non-plain text", not binary as in "compiled version
> of a source code". Here binary format is only used for efficiency
> reasons. TTF format gives you access to full useful information. It *is*
> a native/source format. It is nowhere "obfuscated" as object code of an
> executable binary.
> I agree with Shriramana that generating a .sfd file from .tff just for
> the sake of getting a plain text document containing exactly the same
> information wouldn't make much sense.
> --
> Bernard Massot
>
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-- 
Cheers
Dave

(Please note, this email is my personal opinion and does not represent
the views of any of my consulting clients.)