From OFLB

We are committed to promoting all the quality fonts that are freely usable, redistributable and modifiable, worldwide and commercially.

If you understand how free font licenses work then you may be surprised that the Open Font Library currently only supports sharing fonts licensed under the Open Font License or dedicated to the public domain. Afterall, there are lots of other free culture licenses that are suitable for fonts.

Our reason for a limited selection of licenses is simple: We want to improve the quality of the fonts here, and that means making font licensing less complicated for our visitors.

While we do hope to support the most popular licenses suitable for fonts soon, this requires some programming work on our website, so you'll need to be patient.

If you would like to help with this, please start a discussion in our community about your license preference, and ask for directions on where to start programming.

If you have a font that you want to publish under another license, please do so at your own website and add a link to it to our list of existing free fonts.

More free font licensing resources

• The GNU Project maintains a lengthy definition of the term "free software" and a list of free software licenses. When considering whether a font with a certain license should be eligible for the Open Font Library we follow this list, but exceptions will be considered on a case by case basis on our mailing list.

• Creative Commons provides a range of licenses, from the public domain where you have "no rights reserved," to non-free licenses that prohibit commercial use. Non-commercial licenses are not acceptable for the Open Font Library because we want to encourage use of these typefaces by professionals and amateurs alike.

• The GNU GPL is the most popular free software program license, because it has a "strong copyleft." This means that GPL fonts can't be embedded in PDF. But to allow this the GNU project suggests an additional permission called the "Font Exception". We will require version 3 of the GPL and the Font Exception for GPL fonts to be uploaded to the OFLB.

• Other legal considerations for font licensing are explored in the Fedora wiki.

• The Question Copyright website explains the history of copyright, and why not having "all rights reserved" works is a good idea.