LICENCE-FAQ.txt 8.8 KB

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  1. Ubuntu Font Family Licensing FAQ
  2. Stylistic Foundations
  3. The Ubuntu Font Family is the first time that a libre typeface has been
  4. designed professionally and explicitly with the intent of developing a
  5. public and long-term community-based development process.
  6. When developing an open project, it is generally necessary to have firm
  7. foundations: a font needs to maintain harmony within itself even across
  8. many type designers and writing systems. For the [1]Ubuntu Font Family,
  9. the process has been guided with the type foundry Dalton Maag setting
  10. the project up with firm stylistic foundation covering several
  11. left-to-right scripts: Latin, Greek and Cyrillic; and right-to-left
  12. scripts: Arabic and Hebrew (due in 2011).
  13. With this starting point the community will, under the supervision of
  14. [2]Canonical and [3]Dalton Maag, be able to build on the existing font
  15. sources to expand their character coverage. Ultimately everybody will
  16. be able to use the Ubuntu Font Family in their own written languages
  17. across the whole of Unicode (and this will take some time!).
  18. Licensing
  19. The licence chosen by any free software project is one of the
  20. foundational decisions that sets out how derivatives and contributions
  21. can occur, and in turn what kind of community will form around the
  22. project.
  23. Using a licence that is compatible with other popular licences is a
  24. powerful constraint because of the [4]network effects: the freedom to
  25. share improvements between projects allows free software to reach
  26. high-quality over time. Licence-proliferation leads to many
  27. incompatible licences, undermining the network effect, the freedom to
  28. share and ultimately making the libre movement that Ubuntu is a part of
  29. less effective. For all kinds of software, writing a new licence is not
  30. to be taken lightly and is a choice that needs to be thoroughly
  31. justified if this path is taken.
  32. Today it is not clear to Canonical what the best licence for a font
  33. project like the Ubuntu Font Family is: one that starts life designed
  34. by professionals and continues with the full range of community
  35. development, from highly commercial work in new directions to curious
  36. beginners' experimental contributions. The fast and steady pace of the
  37. Ubuntu release cycle means that an interim libre licence has been
  38. necessary to enable the consideration of the font family as part of
  39. Ubuntu 10.10 operating system release.
  40. Before taking any decision on licensing, Canonical as sponsor and
  41. backer of the project has reviewed the many existing licenses used for
  42. libre/open fonts and engaged the stewards of the most popular licenses
  43. in detailed discussions. The current interim licence is the first step
  44. in progressing the state-of-the-art in licensing for libre/open font
  45. development.
  46. The public discussion must now involve everyone in the (comparatively
  47. new) area of the libre/open font community; including font users,
  48. software freedom advocates, open source supporters and existing libre
  49. font developers. Most importantly, the minds and wishes of professional
  50. type designers considering entering the free software business
  51. community must be taken on board.
  52. Conversations and discussion has taken place, privately, with
  53. individuals from the following groups (generally speaking personally on
  54. behalf of themselves, rather than their affiliations):
  55. * [5]SIL International
  56. * [6]Open Font Library
  57. * [7]Software Freedom Law Center
  58. * [8]Google Font API
  59. Document embedding
  60. One issue highlighted early on in the survey of existing font licences
  61. is that of document embedding. Almost all font licences, both free and
  62. unfree, permit embedding a font into a document to a certain degree.
  63. Embedding a font with other works that make up a document creates a
  64. "combined work" and copyleft would normally require the whole document
  65. to be distributed under the terms of the font licence. As beautiful as
  66. the font might be, such a licence makes a font too restrictive for
  67. useful general purpose digital publishing.
  68. The situation is not entirely unique to fonts and is encountered also
  69. with tools such as GNU Bison: a vanilla GNU GPL licence would require
  70. anything generated with Bison to be made available under the terms of
  71. the GPL as well. To avoid this, Bison is [9]published with an
  72. additional permission to the GPL which allows the output of Bison to be
  73. made available under any licence.
  74. The conflict between licensing of fonts and licensing of documents, is
  75. addressed in two popular libre font licences, the SIL OFL and GNU GPL:
  76. * [10]SIL Open Font Licence: When OFL fonts are embedded in a
  77. document, the OFL's terms do not apply to that document. (See
  78. [11]OFL-FAQ for details.
  79. * [12]GPL Font Exception: The situation is resolved by granting an
  80. additional permission to allow documents to not be covered by the
  81. GPL. (The exception is being reviewed).
  82. The Ubuntu Font Family must also resolve this conflict, ensuring that
  83. if the font is embedded and then extracted it is once again clearly
  84. under the terms of its libre licence.
  85. Long-term licensing
  86. Those individuals involved, especially from Ubuntu and Canonical, are
  87. interested in finding a long-term libre licence that finds broad favour
  88. across the whole libre/open font community. The deliberation during the
  89. past months has been on how to licence the Ubuntu Font Family in the
  90. short-term, while knowingly encouraging everyone to pursue a long-term
  91. goal.
  92. * [13]Copyright assignment will be required so that the Ubuntu Font
  93. Family's licensing can be progressively expanded to one (or more)
  94. licences, as best practice continues to evolve within the
  95. libre/open font community.
  96. * Canonical will support and fund legal work on libre font licensing.
  97. It is recognised that the cost and time commitments required are
  98. likely to be significant. We invite other capable parties to join
  99. in supporting this activity.
  100. The GPL version 3 (GPLv3) will be used for Ubuntu Font Family build
  101. scripts and the CC-BY-SA for associated documentation and non-font
  102. content: all items which do not end up embedded in general works and
  103. documents.
  104. Ubuntu Font Licence
  105. For the short-term only, the initial licence is the [14]Ubuntu Font
  106. License (UFL). This is loosely inspired from the work on the SIL
  107. OFL 1.1, and seeks to clarify the issues that arose during discussions
  108. and legal review, from the perspective of the backers, Canonical Ltd.
  109. Those already using established licensing models such as the GPL, OFL
  110. or Creative Commons licensing should have no worries about continuing
  111. to use them. The Ubuntu Font Licence (UFL) and the SIL Open Font
  112. Licence (SIL OFL) are not identical and should not be confused with
  113. each other. Please read the terms precisely. The UFL is only intended
  114. as an interim license, and the overriding aim is to support the
  115. creation of a more suitable and generic libre font licence. As soon as
  116. such a licence is developed, the Ubuntu Font Family will migrate to
  117. it—made possible by copyright assignment in the interium. Between the
  118. OFL 1.1, and the UFL 1.0, the following changes are made to produce the
  119. Ubuntu Font Licence:
  120. * Clarification:
  121. 1. Document embedding (see [15]embedding section above).
  122. 2. Apply at point of distribution, instead of receipt
  123. 3. Author vs. copyright holder disambiguation (type designers are
  124. authors, with the copyright holder normally being the funder)
  125. 4. Define "Propagate" (for internationalisation, similar to the GPLv3)
  126. 5. Define "Substantially Changed"
  127. 6. Trademarks are explicitly not transferred
  128. 7. Refine renaming requirement
  129. Streamlining:
  130. 8. Remove "not to be sold separately" clause
  131. 9. Remove "Reserved Font Name(s)" declaration
  132. A visual demonstration of how these points were implemented can be
  133. found in the accompanying coloured diff between SIL OFL 1.1 and the
  134. Ubuntu Font Licence 1.0: [16]ofl-1.1-ufl-1.0.diff.html
  135. References
  136. 1. http://font.ubuntu.com/
  137. 2. http://www.canonical.com/
  138. 3. http://www.daltonmaag.com/
  139. 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
  140. 5. http://scripts.sil.org/
  141. 6. http://openfontlibrary.org/
  142. 7. http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
  143. 8. http://code.google.com/webfonts
  144. 9. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF
  145. 10. http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_web
  146. 11. http://scripts.sil.org/OFL-FAQ_web
  147. 12. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException
  148. 13. https://launchpad.net/~uff-contributors
  149. 14. http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/ubuntu-font-licence-1.0.txt
  150. 15. http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/FAQ.html#embedding
  151. 16. http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/ofl-1.1-ufl-1.0.diff.html