Re: which license to use?

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:56:26AM -0600, Larson, Timothy E. wrote:
> > Let's do a practical review first, ok?
> > 
> > (1), (1a) and (2) are effectively CC-NC-ND
> 
> OK, good so far.
> 
> > (3) and (3a) shouldn't be in a generic license. (4) is effectively
> > useless in many jurisdictions too. (5) is either evil or useless.
> 
> So, instead of having 3/3a in the license to say "This doesn't apply
> to fonts X/Y/Z", you'd suggest having extra-license statement saying,
> "The ${mylicense} license applies to all my fonts except X/Y/Z"? 
> Since those forbidden fonts are not in the package anyway, those
> clauses seem superfluous in this cas, but I see what you're saying.

I would recomment pointing to the right open/commercial license on the
page of each font family, yes.

> Clause 4 seems obvious to me: if you don't abide by the license, you
> no longer have license to use the licensed material. Break the terms
> of the agreement, and the agreement is off. But IANAL, so maybe
> something like that must still be stated.

Yes.

> I don't know if clause 5 is meant to imply that changes would work
> retroactively, or just that updated versions of the license may apply
> to future downloads. I can see how the former could really bite someone.

Exactly.

> > Now for the specific case of a font license, I would strongly
> > recomment studying two of the Open Source licenses:
> > 
> > http://opensource.org/licenses/ipafont
> > http://opensource.org/licenses/openfont
> 
> I'm pretty sure they're not meant to be Open Source fonts.  CC BY-NC-ND
> may be an option, if the "NC" part allows for commercial USE just not
> commercial DISTRIBUTION.  *skims creativecommons.org*  Seems this
> distinction is not covered. Hmmm...

I don't know what the intentions are, but reading Open Source licenses
can help to form a clear picture of the intention and therefore can help
to make clear what is used. I was mentioning CC to give a clear idea of
the concept, but the NC part is problematic here for the same reason as
the original license text.

> > One important aspect to consider is that digital use of a font can be
> > considered either a copy or a modified version (since it is only a
> > subset of the original font). So a "no sell" clause would effectively
> > prevent using the font in commercial documents. I don't know if this
> > is the intention or not.
> 
> So you suggest something like the explicit grant of rights to create
> commercial products using the font, like the dbz-ttf-license has?

dbz-ttf-license talks about it. I'm not sure it is a good example. The
"Linux distributation" clause certainly feels bogus to me based on the
BSD background. The separation between pay-by-time and pay-for-use is
also weak. The list of use cases is also a bit schizophrenic, if I may
use somewhat stronger language. My point is that the enumeration makes
it clear that the author has a picture in mind what he likes other to do
with his work and what not, but it doesn't seem to be a very sharp
picture.

I hope Ms. Bettencourt doesn't get the wrong impression from this :)

Joerg

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