[webkit-dev] SIL Open Font License and WebKit

[Maciej Stachowiak]

Apple's legal department would strongly prefer for WebKit's license terms to remain simple. We prefer everything to be licensed under LGPL or BSD terms, or at the very least a license which is clearly compatible with LGPL and BSD. Is this license LGPL-compatible for cases where the fonts are embedded as data in software?

For support material that has unusual license terms, another possibility is to have WebKit's support scripts automatically download it, rather than checking it directly into the repository.

Regards,
Maciej

On Jul 16, 2010, at 8:05 AM, Eric Seidel wrote:

> A little web searching produced:
> 
> It's OSI approved:
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/openfont.html
> 
> GNU thinks it's OK, albeit having an "unusual requirement":
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Fonts
> 
> Fedora recommended:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Font_Licenses
> 
> It would appear to be "the font license".
> 
> -eric
> 
> On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 5:05 AM, Alex Milowski <alex at milowski.org> wrote:
>> We have a licensing issue we need to address for MathML.  We need the STIX
>> fonts as they will provide consistent rendering for Mathematics.  I highly
>> suspect these fonts will find themselves on our desktops somewhere down
>> the road.  Meanwhile, we need them for our testing infrastructure to
>> actually work across all the platforms.
>> 
>> The STIX Fonts are available under the SIL Open Font License:
>> 
>>   http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=OFL_web
>> 
>> You can see the patch that adds these fonts here:
>> 
>>   https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41961
>> 
>> I think we need to adjust our licensing policy to include font licenses
>> like the above.  It is unlikely that the STIX consortium will change their
>> font licensing.  In reality, they don't need to do so.  The font license is
>> intended to support "open source" fonts.
>> 
>> --
>> --Alex Milowski
>> "The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
>> inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
>> considered."
>> 
>> Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics
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