No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
{{ | {{CompactHeader|fonts}} | ||
General Fedora [[Packaging/LicensingGuidelines| guidelines]] apply to font licenses too. | General Fedora [[Packaging/LicensingGuidelines| guidelines]] apply to font licenses too. | ||
| Line 114: | Line 114: | ||
== Disclaimer == | == Disclaimer == | ||
No usage of trademarks, either in this page or in any license "short identifiers" is intended as advertising. Any trademarks used are the property of their owners. | No usage of trademarks, either in this page or in any license "short identifiers" is intended as advertising. Any trademarks used are the property of their owners. | ||
{{:Fonts_SIG_signature}} | |||
[[Category:Fonts SIG]] | |||
Revision as of 10:55, 15 June 2008
General Fedora guidelines apply to font licenses too.
Nevertheless fonts are not software, or are a very specialized form of software, and font packagers or reviewers should be familiar with font legal specificities.}}
International font laws
Intellectual property laws concerning fonts vary greatly from country to country. In some countries font data is copyrightable but font designs aren't. In other countries font designs are copyrightable, but font data not. Because Fedora is an international project, fonts distributed with Fedora need to respect a wider set of legal protections than those of any one country.
The following attempts to briefly summarize the situation for the use of people interested in getting fonts included into Fedora.
.png){kind=small}
Nothing below should be taken as a legal opinion. Opinions vary wildly as to what forms of IP protection apply to fonts. Opinions vary even more wildly as to what forms of IP protection should apply to fonts.
Various forms of protection exist for fonts:
- Font names can be trademarked throughout most of the world. While a few names, such as Courier are in the public domain, most of the familiar font names such as Arial or Helvetica are the trademarks of one company or another.
- The computerized data making up the font is subject to copyright in the United States and some other countries. This protection continues through automated conversion to a different format. (The design of text fonts itself is not subject to copyright in the US. In the US, if the design of a font is not otherwise protected, it's legal to print out a large image of the font then retrace it. However, proving that the new outlines were not generated from the computerized original data may be difficult.)
- Type designs themselves have protections in some countries. In the UK, font designs have been subject to copyright since 1989. France and Germany are other countries with protection for typeface designs.
- In the US "design patents" can be granted for fonts, though this is relatively rare. (About 150 design patents for fonts have been granted in total by the USPTO.) A design patent lasts 14 years from date of grant. Originality of the design is required.
- Font designs can be protected by "design registration" in some countries. The terms of this vary between countries. In the UK, for example, a design registration can be extended in 5 year increments up to 25 years.
OwenTaylor, 2004
Rules to remember
Most often, a font creator won't be a software developer, but someone with an artist background. He won't select his license from the pool of software licenses you're familiar with, but choose a text reflecting his priorities.
Font licenses try to protect the font design
Font designers feel their creation is a very personal work of art, and they will often forbid modification (or only allow extension of the font without changing its original core). It has been argued in the past since fonts are content, or art, we needn't apply our strict freedom checks to them.
Fonts however are not just art. They're functional art. The core purpose of a font is to permit representing text humans can read, in a changing technical context[[FootNote(The unicode.org consortium revises its encoding tables regularly, font formats change over time, text layouting libraries are refined and can use new font features, screen and printer capabilities change etc.)]. Like any other technical component of Fedora, fonts are subject to bug-fixing, enhancement, adaptation to new technical rules.
Nowadays, we require font licenses to be as permissive as software licenses, and in particular to allow modification.
A license that requires using another font name if the font is modified, however, is acceptable and can be used to accommodate font designer feelings.
Name changing is the compromise the GNOME Foundation used when it convinced Bitstream to release Vera. Bitstream Vera licensing is generally considered a success, even if the renaming requirement proved a definite cost: when Bitstream stopped updating Vera everyone forked it under a different name, and it took years for the forks to consolidate under a single project.
Font licenses often forbid standalone distribution
Because fonts are OS-agnostic, do not weight a lot, are highly desirable by most computer users, fonts have been an early victim of widespread illegal digital copying. While font designers may be sympathetic to FLOSS software, and turn a blind eye to home copiers, they absolutely loathe the freeloaders that collect illegally huge numbers of fonts and sell them by the CD/DVD.
When a font designer liberates a font he will usually try to forbid its inclusion in such a collection. If the license is well written it will not be a problem for Fedora — we distribute fonts in packages, in conjunction with lots of other non-font elements.
Good font licenses allow embedding
Because everyone does not have the same fonts installed on his system, common digital document formats like PDF allow embedding fonts. If the license of those fonts is a vanilla GPL, the legal status of such a document is subject to interpretation. While Fedora will not reject GPLed fonts, vanilla GPL is not a good font license.
For this reason the FSF has published an embedding exception text , but many font projects forget to add it to their licensing.
Font licenses can be a mess
Also, font designers are (unfortunately) not lawyers. They will tend to use one-of-a-kind licenses with badly understood legal effects. This license proliferation will in turn make the mix and matching, deriving and merging FLOSS projects (including font projects) are so fond of mightily hard.
When you're convincing a designer or a foundry to liberate a font, please choose our preferred license . It's been carefully worded to protect the interests of everyone, and many people have reviewed it.
The data of a font must be original
It is never appropriate to start with data from a proprietary font and incorporate it into your own font, no matter what conversion process is in-between. An obvious exception to this is if the license of the original allows modifications. For example, the URW fonts included with Fedora are licensed under the GPL and data from them can be used in other GPL fonts. If you copy data from another font, you must also include the original copyright notice and license in your font.
Careless font hobbyists will often copy and adapt glyphs from existing "free" fonts, without checking their license is actually compatible, or the source they've taken their "free" font from is legitimate[1]. When importing a font in Fedora, the packager & reviewer must make sure (via data analysis or by checking twice with the font designer) the font has not been tainted in such a way.
Beware of font clones
Along with legal issues, there are also ethical issues. A new type design with genuine innovation is a major creative work. Even if is legal to create an exact curve-by-curve clone of Palatino or Comic Sans, is it really appropriate to do so? Lettering has been done for thousands of years, printing for hundreds of years. If you don't have the skill to come with a new type design on your own, that's no reason to rip off last year's hot font.
Restrict yourself to cloning nice old fonts, from old paper samples.
Allowed font licenses
These are the Font Licenses that we're aware of. If your license is not in this list, and you'd like to know if it is appropriate for Fedora, please email the details to fedora-legal-list@redhat.com (note that this list is moderated, only members may directly post).
The GPL is also a valid though not ideal license for fonts. Refer to the Software Licensing table for the correct short name identifiers.
Preferred License
Early attempts to liberate fonts showed font designers didn't like FLOSS licenses, and that besides FLOSS licenses didn't apply so well to fonts. Existing font licenses were overly restrictive and free at best in the monetary sense. The liberation of Bitstream Vera by the GNOME Foundation proved compromise was possible. However the Vera license itself is less than ideal and no one wants to generalize it.
Nowadays, to avoid the license proliferation mess which is just as problematic in the free/libre/open ecosystem as in the software one, the Fedora project joins other free/libre/open actors, and recommends new font projects choose the OFL, and existing projects consider relicensing.
| Full Name | Short Name | FSF Free? | Upstream URL |
| SIL Open Font License 1.1 http://scripts.sil.org/cms/sites/nrsi/media/OFL_logo_rect_color.png | OFL | Yes | http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_web |
Other good Licenses
Here is a list of Font Licenses that are OK for Fedora. If your license is not in this list, and you'd like to know if it is appropriate for Fedora, please email the details to fedora-legal-list@redhat.com (note that this list is moderated, only members may directly post).
Bad Licenses
This is a list of Font licenses which are NOT OKAY for Fedora. Nothing in Fedora should be using these licenses. They're either non-free, deprecated, or have usage/distribution restrictions.
| Full Name | FSF Free? | Upstream URL | Notes |
| DIP SIPA Font License | NO | https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/DIP_SIPA_Font_License | Restrictions on modification |
| Larabie Fonts License | NO | https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/LarabieFontsLicense | Cannot modify |
| Literat Font License | NO | https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/LiteratFontLicense | Cannot modify |
| Ubuntu Font License | NO | https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/UbuntuFontLicense | Poorly written, cannot actually use fonts |
Disclaimer
No usage of trademarks, either in this page or in any license "short identifiers" is intended as advertising. Any trademarks used are the property of their owners.
The Fonts SIG takes loving care of Fedora fonts. Please join this special interest group if you are interested in creating, improving, packaging, or just suggesting a font. Any help will be appreciated.
- ↑ Remember the "free" font collections good font designers hate so much?