[webkit-dev] SIL Open Font License and WebKit

[Alex Milowski]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

The SIL Open Font License isn't unusual.

The STIX fonts were developed specifically for the purpose of supporting
the display of Mathematics.  Certainly, a user can easily change
the fonts via CSS and then their experience may vary depending on
the unicode characters they use and whether there are glyphs for
those characters given their choices.

We'd be foolish not to rely upon them for proper and consistent rendering.

I'm not certain where to go from here.  We can make the tests work in
a number of ways to avoid checking in the actual fonts.  We can't fix
the problem that the STIX fonts were developed to overcome without
doing that ourselves.

Maybe the Apple legal folks need to talk with the Scientific and Technical
Information Exchange (STIX) folks [1], or the American Institute of
Physic [2], or the ACS [3], or the AMS [4] or the IEEE [5] or the
APS [6], or Elsevier [7] and decide on a way forward.  It wasn't developed
in a vacuum and was meant for the purpose for which we are using it

[1] http://www.stixfonts.org/
[2] http://www.aip.org/
[3] http://www.chemistry.org/
[4] http://www.ams.org/
[5] http://www.ieee.org/
[6] http://www.aps.org/
[7] http://www.elsevier.com/

-- 
--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