Open Font License
From OFLB
We recommend the SIL Open Font License as the best way to make fonts freely available. Applying the license is easy, because the license is very short. Please do read the licence before you use it.
About the Open Font License
While developing the Open Font License, three sets of interests were balanced:
- Lawyers. Everyone needs the OFL to be solid legally. From the start, the license authors had well-known free software lawyers like Eben Moglen involved. They are also very open to any other lawyers with expertise in the area to comment.
- The free software community. There was no free software license specifically written for fonts. The OFL needs to be a free software license. Folks like Richard Stallman and Brett Smith at the FSF have confirmed that the all revisions are free licenses, and approval of the OSI is pending. There has been great acceptance on the part of free software developers and package maintainers.
- Type designers. If type designers aren't happy with the terms of the license, then there won't be any OFL Fonts, and the license is useless. Because of the specific conditions that are in the license, a lot of type designers are satisfied with it, and are beginning to release fonts that they would not have released under other free software licenses, such as the GPL. The OFL has to be understandable by type designers wishing to create derivatives too. They have to be clear on what is and what is not allowed, even if the license text is somewhat redundant. The success of the OFL depends on correct use.
What this means is that SIL needed to include some conditions that directly address designer concerns, even though they do place restrictions on what can be done (particularly with the font name). And while font names can be trademarked (and legally 'reserved' via that mechanism), user understanding of trademark law is very poor, so designers weren't willing to trust that the trademark was enough protection. That's the kind of balance SIL tried to create.
SIL wants to maximise the availability of high quality, truly free fonts for people around the world. The OFL is their carefully balanced attempt to enable that to happen. SIL tried to make accidental misuse as unlikely as possible. Giving derivative makers a clear way to use and modify OFL fonts makes all the difference. If it's easy to use without debilitating restrictions, then there's little motivation to be deceptive.
Condition 1 is trivial to satisfy by adding a two-byte script to the software. But designers would not use the OFL if it were not there. The intent is to dissuade people from taking OFL fonts and dropping them into a web point-of-sale mechanism and making money without doing any work. It's a way of trying to keep the end user and the designer from getting cheated all around. The condition can be trivially met, so if you really want to be devious you can. SIL bounced lots of ideas around on how to make the condition more bullet-proof, but every option considered would either be too confusing, ambiguous or restrictive.
The point is that the intent is expressed - "please don't sell OFL fonts, they are meant to be available with a zero price tag." So if you do choose to sell them with a trivial bit of code, then you know very well that you are doing something strange. This moral check seems to satisfy many designers. And it doesn't rule out some kind of monetary donation to the designers for their work, of course!
Victor Gaultney, co-author of the OFL and designer of the Gentium typeface, said: "I don't want someone setting up an e-commerce site that sells Unicode fonts, and advertise Gentium as being 'for sale'. To do so may fool users into thinking that they have to pay to use the font and would allow someone else to make money off of my creation without doing any value-added work. I don't mind if a publisher bundles Gentium with a linguistic program, as long as Gentium is an enhancement to something else they've done, not just a device to siphon money from users who don't know any better."
The "Restricted Font Names" feature is a critical part of the OFL, and does not stop designers from declaring their trademarks in addition to protecting the name through RFN. So people can fully use both.
Condition 4 is 'in your face' author protection so that it is very obvious that you musn't do bad things with the names and reputations of the authors/designers. It's not legally necessary, but if it wasn't there no designers would want to use the OFL, and users could misuse names without even thinking twice.
Regaring the GPL, the license is pretty clear that relicensing the fonts under the GPL is not allowed. It would be rather hard to ignore that basic restriction. But if people are given an easy way to release the fonts *alongside* software (GPL, MIT, or whatever), there is less need for GPL fonts.
And it is possible to release two versions of a font - one under the GPL and one under the OFL. The "may not be distributed under any other license" still allows onward distribution of dual-licensed fonts. Authors can release their fonts under as many licenses as they want - even more restrictive ones. But we're hoping that people will see the OFL as the single best one for fonts - a free license that protects the author in a minimal but sufficient way.
Over on Typophile, Tom Phinney (Adobe Fonts dude) said he liked the OFL.
The OSI board has now officially recognized the compliance of the Open Font License v1.1 with the Open Source Definition and added the OFL to the list of approved licenses
(Based on posts by Victor Gaultney to the ofl-discuss mailing list, with permission)