[native-lang] Review of an Open Font licence

Hi all,

I received this mail that may be of interest for you too. It's about an 
open source font licensing project. I've met those people several times, 
last time this summer and I think that you could be of great help for 
them too.
Before reading the mail, here is the link for a description of their 
project :
http://www.sil.org/
I've not answered them yet, but will do through the week-end after 
reviewing their licence (that take some time ;)
Don't hesitate to bring your feedback and thanks in advance :)

Kind regards
Sophie
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Dear Sophie,

You recently talked with us about our efforts to design a FLOSS license for
fonts. We now have a draft of the license ready for review, and hope that
you can help us refine it before we put it to use starting in October.

SIL international is a worldwide development and educational organization
(NGO) that studies, documents, and assists in developing the world's
lesser-known languages through literacy, linguistics, translation, and
other academic disciplines. Our goal is to facilitate language-based
development and - along with other partners in the development and
computing fields - contribute to the great task of enabling wider g11n,
i18n and l10n support so as to remove the obstacles standing in the way of
many lesser-known language communities' access to unrestricted software and
content in their own language. You may have heard about our work on complex
script rendering and our set of linguistic fonts among other projects.

We have drafted a free and open source license dedicated to fonts and
related software called the OFL (Open Font License) and would very much
like to hear your thoughts and comments, as well as any concerns and
suggestions (even patches) you have on the proposed licensing model. We are
now starting an open review allowing the stakeholders in the Free/Libre and
Open Source Software communities as well as the type design communities to
voice their needs and ideas and to improve our proposed model in a
transparent and collaborative way. We hope to have the review complete by
October 15.

We have done our best to make our licensing model fit with the gold
standards of the community, namely the FSF Free Software definition, the
Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition while
retaining elements which are crucial to font design. We need you to tell us
how compliant the proposed licensing model really is and what we may need
to improve. We have also worked on making the license as neutral and
re-usable as possible so other organisations in the community can use it
for their own fonts.

We have been inspired by the efforts of the GNOME foundation and Bitstream
for the Vera family of fonts but we are seeking and proposing solutions to
improve the areas where this model was too project-specific and left
important elements like embedding and the status of derivatives very
unclear.

Our goals are to:

- respond to the call for input on this subject since we've been doing font
design for decades

- improve the current status of free fonts in terms of quality and
availability on various platforms

- provide increased readability and clarity for all the contributors so
that more font designers and font engineers can understand the rules and
join a free and open typographic community. We also hope this will help
unify the various free font licenses out there and become a solution
against font license proliferation.

- we want to contribute to the creation of a free and open typographic
community by freeing up our high quality Unicode fonts (Doulos, Gentium,
Charis... etc), allowing wider dissemination and bundling of the fonts on
Free Software platforms, and giving freedom to any designer and font
engineer to adapt the fonts to their needs and to make derivatives. So we
want to bridge the type design community and the FLOSS community both
technically and culturally and so help a free and open typographic
community to spring up and grow. We also want to improve the currently
limited set of free and open tools available to a font designer and font
engineer. We have plans to work on utilities and documentation to share our
expertise in that area.

Your well-regarded work, contributions and leadership role in the
Free/Libre and Open Source community makes you one of the best persons to
give us your thoughts on this proposed model. We want the community at
large to be able to participate in this review but we feel your insights
will be more relevant since you have extensive experience in the field of
licensing and/or typography in major projects.

This is why we would like to invite you as part of a first round of public
reviewers to study the proposed license, the rationale behind the model and
its working methodologies so that you can tell us what's working and what
bugs we need to fix together.

All the details (including a FAQ and various documents explaining the
rationale behind the license) are available at http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

We have set up two dedicated mailing-lists to host the discussions:
http://openlists.sil.org/mailman/listinfo/ofl-discuss  - to host the review
discussions around the proposed model and the license draft
http://openlists.sil.org/mailman/listinfo/ofl-announce - to announce font
projects released under the OFL by us and others in the community

Some informal review has already happened with you and a few people during
the RMLL (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) in Dijon, France in July.
An official presentation on open font licensing was hosted at the recent
ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) TypeTech forum in
Helsinki, Finland earlier this month.

Our plan is to release all our new fonts under the OFL and re-release our
older font projects as needed as soon as the community has helped us refine
and validate the licensing model so we can publish a version 1.0.

Beyond the OFL, there is a bigger picture: the open font license is part of
our global effort to enable and contribute to a fully open writing systems
implementation components stack going from smart input methods to smart
rendering engines integrated in Office and Internet suites. We want to
fully enable language communities who have been left out by proprietary
vendors until now. To this end we are transitioning our software
methodologies to open models and seeking increased partnerships with others
in the FLOSS community.

Thank you for your time and help in improving the state of free typography
and lesser-known language support on free desktops.

Feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you think could be
interested in taking part in the discussion.

Looking forward to your feedback,

Victor Gaultney and Nicolas Spalinger, the OFL authors.
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