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authorRyan Kavanagh <rak@rak.ac>2021-12-13 16:07:35 -0500
committerRyan Kavanagh <rak@rak.ac>2021-12-13 16:07:36 -0500
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tree1c537dce87c7603cddec9e94ce8eeec7a1a09100 /.fonts/ubuntu-font-family-0.80/LICENCE-FAQ.txt
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- Ubuntu Font Family Licensing FAQ
-
- Stylistic Foundations
-
- The Ubuntu Font Family is the first time that a libre typeface has been
- designed professionally and explicitly with the intent of developing a
- public and long-term community-based development process.
-
- When developing an open project, it is generally necessary to have firm
- foundations: a font needs to maintain harmony within itself even across
- many type designers and writing systems. For the [1]Ubuntu Font Family,
- the process has been guided with the type foundry Dalton Maag setting
- the project up with firm stylistic foundation covering several
- left-to-right scripts: Latin, Greek and Cyrillic; and right-to-left
- scripts: Arabic and Hebrew (due in 2011).
-
- With this starting point the community will, under the supervision of
- [2]Canonical and [3]Dalton Maag, be able to build on the existing font
- sources to expand their character coverage. Ultimately everybody will
- be able to use the Ubuntu Font Family in their own written languages
- across the whole of Unicode (and this will take some time!).
-
- Licensing
-
- The licence chosen by any free software project is one of the
- foundational decisions that sets out how derivatives and contributions
- can occur, and in turn what kind of community will form around the
- project.
-
- Using a licence that is compatible with other popular licences is a
- powerful constraint because of the [4]network effects: the freedom to
- share improvements between projects allows free software to reach
- high-quality over time. Licence-proliferation leads to many
- incompatible licences, undermining the network effect, the freedom to
- share and ultimately making the libre movement that Ubuntu is a part of
- less effective. For all kinds of software, writing a new licence is not
- to be taken lightly and is a choice that needs to be thoroughly
- justified if this path is taken.
-
- Today it is not clear to Canonical what the best licence for a font
- project like the Ubuntu Font Family is: one that starts life designed
- by professionals and continues with the full range of community
- development, from highly commercial work in new directions to curious
- beginners' experimental contributions. The fast and steady pace of the
- Ubuntu release cycle means that an interim libre licence has been
- necessary to enable the consideration of the font family as part of
- Ubuntu 10.10 operating system release.
-
- Before taking any decision on licensing, Canonical as sponsor and
- backer of the project has reviewed the many existing licenses used for
- libre/open fonts and engaged the stewards of the most popular licenses
- in detailed discussions. The current interim licence is the first step
- in progressing the state-of-the-art in licensing for libre/open font
- development.
-
- The public discussion must now involve everyone in the (comparatively
- new) area of the libre/open font community; including font users,
- software freedom advocates, open source supporters and existing libre
- font developers. Most importantly, the minds and wishes of professional
- type designers considering entering the free software business
- community must be taken on board.
-
- Conversations and discussion has taken place, privately, with
- individuals from the following groups (generally speaking personally on
- behalf of themselves, rather than their affiliations):
- * [5]SIL International
- * [6]Open Font Library
- * [7]Software Freedom Law Center
- * [8]Google Font API
-
- Document embedding
-
- One issue highlighted early on in the survey of existing font licences
- is that of document embedding. Almost all font licences, both free and
- unfree, permit embedding a font into a document to a certain degree.
- Embedding a font with other works that make up a document creates a
- "combined work" and copyleft would normally require the whole document
- to be distributed under the terms of the font licence. As beautiful as
- the font might be, such a licence makes a font too restrictive for
- useful general purpose digital publishing.
-
- The situation is not entirely unique to fonts and is encountered also
- with tools such as GNU Bison: a vanilla GNU GPL licence would require
- anything generated with Bison to be made available under the terms of
- the GPL as well. To avoid this, Bison is [9]published with an
- additional permission to the GPL which allows the output of Bison to be
- made available under any licence.
-
- The conflict between licensing of fonts and licensing of documents, is
- addressed in two popular libre font licences, the SIL OFL and GNU GPL:
- * [10]SIL Open Font Licence: When OFL fonts are embedded in a
- document, the OFL's terms do not apply to that document. (See
- [11]OFL-FAQ for details.
- * [12]GPL Font Exception: The situation is resolved by granting an
- additional permission to allow documents to not be covered by the
- GPL. (The exception is being reviewed).
-
- The Ubuntu Font Family must also resolve this conflict, ensuring that
- if the font is embedded and then extracted it is once again clearly
- under the terms of its libre licence.
-
- Long-term licensing
-
- Those individuals involved, especially from Ubuntu and Canonical, are
- interested in finding a long-term libre licence that finds broad favour
- across the whole libre/open font community. The deliberation during the
- past months has been on how to licence the Ubuntu Font Family in the
- short-term, while knowingly encouraging everyone to pursue a long-term
- goal.
- * [13]Copyright assignment will be required so that the Ubuntu Font
- Family's licensing can be progressively expanded to one (or more)
- licences, as best practice continues to evolve within the
- libre/open font community.
- * Canonical will support and fund legal work on libre font licensing.
- It is recognised that the cost and time commitments required are
- likely to be significant. We invite other capable parties to join
- in supporting this activity.
-
- The GPL version 3 (GPLv3) will be used for Ubuntu Font Family build
- scripts and the CC-BY-SA for associated documentation and non-font
- content: all items which do not end up embedded in general works and
- documents.
-
-Ubuntu Font Licence
-
- For the short-term only, the initial licence is the [14]Ubuntu Font
- License (UFL). This is loosely inspired from the work on the SIL
- OFL 1.1, and seeks to clarify the issues that arose during discussions
- and legal review, from the perspective of the backers, Canonical Ltd.
- Those already using established licensing models such as the GPL, OFL
- or Creative Commons licensing should have no worries about continuing
- to use them. The Ubuntu Font Licence (UFL) and the SIL Open Font
- Licence (SIL OFL) are not identical and should not be confused with
- each other. Please read the terms precisely. The UFL is only intended
- as an interim license, and the overriding aim is to support the
- creation of a more suitable and generic libre font licence. As soon as
- such a licence is developed, the Ubuntu Font Family will migrate to
- it—made possible by copyright assignment in the interium. Between the
- OFL 1.1, and the UFL 1.0, the following changes are made to produce the
- Ubuntu Font Licence:
- * Clarification:
-
- 1. Document embedding (see [15]embedding section above).
- 2. Apply at point of distribution, instead of receipt
- 3. Author vs. copyright holder disambiguation (type designers are
- authors, with the copyright holder normally being the funder)
- 4. Define "Propagate" (for internationalisation, similar to the GPLv3)
- 5. Define "Substantially Changed"
- 6. Trademarks are explicitly not transferred
- 7. Refine renaming requirement
-
- Streamlining:
- 8. Remove "not to be sold separately" clause
- 9. Remove "Reserved Font Name(s)" declaration
-
- A visual demonstration of how these points were implemented can be
- found in the accompanying coloured diff between SIL OFL 1.1 and the
- Ubuntu Font Licence 1.0: [16]ofl-1.1-ufl-1.0.diff.html
-
-References
-
- 1. http://font.ubuntu.com/
- 2. http://www.canonical.com/
- 3. http://www.daltonmaag.com/
- 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
- 5. http://scripts.sil.org/
- 6. http://openfontlibrary.org/
- 7. http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
- 8. http://code.google.com/webfonts
- 9. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF
- 10. http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_web
- 11. http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web
- 12. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException
- 13. https://launchpad.net/~uff-contributors
- 14. http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/ubuntu-font-licence-1.0.txt
- 15. http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/FAQ.html#embedding
- 16. http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/ofl-1.1-ufl-1.0.diff.html