We (Tiro) have drafted a new kind of license agreement that ties permitted use of a font to specific language content. As far as I know, it's the first license of its kind, but if you know of any others, I'd love to know we're not alone. We're looking for feedback from the intended user communities via GitHub issue tracking, but thought I'd post something about it here too, to get some separate discussion started with colleagues in the type business.
https://github.com/TiroTypeworks/ILLA
Comments
Is the use e. g. as a webfont for a multi-lingual dictionary free? Or for e. g. Wikipedia or Wiktionary in the versions with another main language? If not the license hurts the intention. E. g. I run a multilingual dictionary as a non-profit project (zero revenues, EUR 200 p. m. expenses, no ads, no donations) where Inuktitut (ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ) in Canadian Aboriginal syllabics is one of the hundreds languages. For many of the writing systems with small populations or extinct ones, often only one font exists.
When I publish software (does juridically compare to fonts) under a free license my decision criteria are:
- is it generally useful
- give it free unrestricted, e. g. a library module as contribution to the community, if it's a by-product of my work
- restrict it to non-commercial
- don't give it free and don't publish if it potentially can generate income.
- don't give away the gems for free
My definition of non-commercial is very restrictive. A scientist having a good income at an university isn't non-commercial in my point of view. It depends if I get something back in exchange, or they contribute to the community in a comparable quality.
As an example I got an inquiry from a high funded research organisation if they can have one of my dictionaries (3 Mio. records) for free. I offered USD 0.01 per record after calculating my work hours spent on the dataset.
I wouldn't invest much time in a special indigenous license. I would take the usual licenses and think more about a basic, free version for non-commercial, non-reselling use and other payed, full versions.