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authorRyan Kavanagh <rak@rak.ac>2021-12-13 17:17:25 -0500
committerRyan Kavanagh <rak@rak.ac>2021-12-13 17:17:25 -0500
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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