I'm considering a project to make a derivate of an Open Font licensed under SIL, I understand the derivate should follow the same license, but does it have to be publicly published?
The SIL site gives contradictory messages, or at least contradictory to my limited comprehension on legal jargon:
https://openfontlicense.org/how-to-modify-ofl-fonts/In the same page it first states:
You are making changes to an existing open font and creating a derivative which means that new version must also remain open and should be publicly released.
And later:
3.6 Do I have to make any derivative fonts (including extended source files, build scripts, documentation, etc.) publicly available?
No, but please consider sharing your improvements with others. You may find that you receive in return more than what you gave.
I understand it's best practice to publish it, just want to know if it's mandatory. Thanks!
Comments
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
As I read it, the license also includes no terms that prevent you from restricting access to the modified font, i.e. if someone were to ask you for a copy of the font file, you are not obliged to give it to them. If they can get their hands on it, they have a right to use it, redistribute it, publish it, etc. under OFL, but the license does not put a requirement on anyone to do those things.
SHOULD be publicly released: that is a should, not a must. The bit in 3.6 makes this explicit, that one does not have to do it.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
At least, that is my reading of the license.
If you are wondering how that could possibly matter, then imagine somebody (a disgruntled employee, or a hacker, or...) taking a copy of the font from the place that made the derivative version, and posting it publicly.
Maybe they are violating an employment contract, or illegally hacking into a system, but the posting of the OFL font would not seem to be any form of copyright infringement.
Like John, I am not a lawyer and not offering legal advice.
Thomas, I agree. A font made by copying any part of another OFL font, where that part is subject to copyright in the first place, is therefore OFL even if never redistributed to third parties, yes Thomas, same as a font made by copying any copyrighted part of a propriety retail font is violating the copyrights of its rightholders. If the former isn't OFL, it is likewise violating the same rights.
Daniel, I basically agree given the above nuance.
Albert, the purpose of libre licensing works in the libre culture movement is to give the recipient of the work the freedom to use, modify and redistribute it, if they wish. Therefore a license that required them to publish their modifications wouldn't be a libre license. However, licenses like the OFL require that all recipients receive the same freedoms as the first recipient. This should make the situation crystal clear.
If you receive it under the OFL, in what sense is it then not OFL?
It is clear to me now that public redistribution is not mandatory.
But the disgruntled employee scenario is quite interesting, since the license doesn't specify the how is the font obtained, so it could be taken/stolen from a company server and could then be disgruntledly redistributed (as OFL):
[In Canada, at least, the phrase ‘All rights reserved’ seems to have been dropped from copyright statements. As I understand, it is considered legally meaningless: failure to include the phrase in a copyright statement has no significance regarding what rights are actually covered by copyright.]
Again, I am not a lawyer...
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Has the disgruntled employee scenario, or similar, ever been tested in court? It seems widely assumed that once a derivative of an OFL-licensed font is loose in the wild, then it is automatically free to be distributed under OFL, but I wonder if that would stand up in court in the circumstance of a custom derivative that is not intended to be distributed, but reserved for the private use of the person who made the derivative?
Here’s an interesting scenario that actually occurs: a font maker publishes a font under OFL. Later, the font maker is contacted by someone who has made or wants to make a derivative but wants it under some other license, possibly a private use proprietary license, or an unrestricted free software license such as MIT or Apache 2.0. This is possible because the font maker, as the copyright holder, can grant any kind of legal license.
Does this suggest that in the disgruntled employee scenario, a decision on the license of the unauthorised distribution of the derivative font might revert back to the copyright holder. since that copyright extends to the derivative?
The OFL is a "viral" license, much like the GPL. But what does it mean for a license to be viral? Well, licenses do not technically attach themselves to derivative works; they're attached to works by the author. The GPL and OFL both contain provisions which require that, if you distribute a derivative work, you must offer it under the GPL/OFL. The GPL is explicit in saying that various requirements only apply if you "convey" the copyrighted work, and the OFL (similarly) provides for conditions that relate to "distribution" of the work.
A strong motivation for people to appreciate libre licensing is that they use a useful digital work like a font and find something "broken" for their use case, and roll up their sleeves to "fix" it. Say, the vertical metrics are producing undesirable spacing in some software environment in active use, and it's easier to change the font than the system. Or say, a Vietnamese accent is mispositioned by a typeface designer who isn't fluent in reading that language, and a native reader wants to reposition it. These are convergent changes to a typeface design. It is common that these fixes get added back to the original "upstream" design, but not always, if the fix is not generally desirable.
A subtle way that usual things can be broken is they can be missing something, such as missing glyphs from a typeface design. Such glyph set extension is also convergent: the additional glyphs harmonize with the original ones, which may not be altered at all. A classic example is Vietnamese people who want to use a Latin font that lacks Vietnamese characters at all. These can be ripe for integration upstream, and being maintained by the original font developer, but they can also be rotten and unacceptable to the original developer, and refused. Often integration of downstream work can be more effort than doing it from scratch, sadly. Better collaboration tools in font editors might help, but this is under explored imo.
Divergent changes are "remixes", and these are inherently difficult or impossible to integrate upstream, and thus are typically "forks", where they are positioned as new upstreams - with new family names. This can be just one glyph or a few, such as the Elizabeth typeface which Gawker Media in house graphic designers derived from Merriweather to change the question mark and quote marks; and which Sorkin Type eventually integrated into Merriweather as a stylistic set. Or, in the case of Ysra, Rosetta Type remixed the entire Merriweather typeface into something recognizably different in overall appearance. They did a nice job documenting this at https://github.rosettatype.com/yrsa-rasa/ although the css seems to be broken on that site now; but it was nearly a decade ago. DM Sans and DM Serif were remixes commissioned from Colophon by DeepMind's branding team. Vernon Adams made Tienne by intermixing Droid Serif and Artifika, https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Tienne/about
Since the OFL is a "strong" copyleft license, not a weak "pushover" non-copyleft license, all derivatives, convergent or divergent, remain OFL, and the possibility to converge them into the original is never foreclosed.
Since web fonts are inherently being redistributed, it's sometimes nice to come across a fresh cut derivative of an OFL font, and know that it's available to download and reuse - and even further remixing.
distributed by anyone other than the original copyright holder must be done so under OFL. Daniel’s point about a license pertaining to actions, e.g, the act of distribution, not to objects, seems an important one to keep in mind even when we do sometimes use a shorthand terminology such as referring to ‘an OFL font’.
The open source license in this case was related to software that was part of the “Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool”—a completely separate program that functions to download a particular version of Windows to removeable media.
The fact that said issue did not affect Windows is in no way evidence for the proposition that: “Let's suppose the maker of a major commercial operating system includes some code from BSD Unix in it.… Our legal and political system, claimed by some to be in thrall to the forces of Big Business, judges that putting the entirety of Microsoft Windows, say, under the GPL as the penalty for such an oversight to be overly harsh.”
The case you are citing simply does not provide any evidence for this proposition, because the code in question was not in the operating system at all. Not even in something bundled with the operating system. Just in a separate tool that is used by end users to download an operating system. So Microsoft just made it open source. Leaving some of us wondering how that is evidence that the opposite would happen if the case was different?
I am not even arguing the OPPOSITE. I am just baffled by how you think you are providing evidence that supports your theory.
So it seems a reasonable question to ask whether licensing chains can be broken?