Re: Four (open-source) Greek fonts are now available, and why it's relevant

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>]

Luis Villa wrote:

> So, a more detailed followup to my first 'ooh, cool' post, and moving
> to board a bit
>
> I would love to do a press release, but it obviously opens up
> questions of 'when will bitstream vera sans 1.0.1 come out?', which we
> don't have answers to :)
>
> Also, as far as I can tell (and please correct me if I'm wrong, Simos)
> the only link to gnome here is that these fonts use the same license
> as the fonts at gnome.org/fonts/, correct? That is an awfully tenous
> link to market around, it seems to me, but I'm open to convincing?
>  

A press release by the GNOME Foundation would be nice, though I too 
believe the link with this font
announcement may not be strong enough.

The real benefit from the GNOME Foundation efforts is with the Copyright 
text, found at http://www.gnome.org/fonts/
In general it's cumbersome to make fonts available as free software.
The easy way is to simply include the GPL text in the tarball. However, 
in many cases, fonts are donations from commercial
entities who would like some sort of "minor" restrictions to the use of 
the fonts, as described in the Bitstream Vera copyright.
There are many fonts on the Web which are described as "free" ("free, 
but for personal use only", "free for use with this application only",
"free but do not modify", etc) but are not suitable to be included in 
Linux distributions.
For example, CODE2001 (http://home.att.net/~jameskass/code2001.htm) 
includes glyphs (characters) for many Unicode ranges that no GPL font 
exists yet,
covering most of the empty spaces in the BMP and Plane 1 planes. The 
author mentions that he does not want modifications to the font
which is fair enough, and the Bitstream Vera-style copyright enforces 
just this restriction; you can add/change glyphs as long as you change 
the name to the resulting new font. Third-parties are encouraged to 
contact the author of the font regarding additions/corrections they may 
have so no forking takes place.

Therefore, an interesting task I can see is to make a document with 
simple guidelines on releasing fonts as open-source
1. Is the GPL suitable for you? If so, release as GPL, add gpl.txt to 
the tarball, edit the font header and that's it.
2. If not, use a Bitstream Vera-style license, edit the Copyright 
document by filling in the placeholders, [do some extra work], add 
copyright.txt to the tarball, edit font header and that's it.
3. After both 1. and 2., make them available to the Debian project (if 
debian accepts the fonts, every distro can use (tm)) with a ttf-xxxx 
name. See http://lyre.mit.edu/debian/pool/main/t/ for all the 
ttf-xxxxxxx packages.
4. Publicise to a list of font sources.

> /me thinks out loud...
>
> Maybe we could move all the fonts to freedesktop, move the mailing
> list there, get them hosted there, and include these other two fonts
> with the same license at the same place (ideally), and do some press
> around that? That seems like a much better place than gnome.org for
> them, realistically, from a technical/organizational point of view,
> anyway.
>  
I believe that most fonts can be served at their individual Web sites. 
In general, they are bound to have copies at their
http://lyre.mit.edu/debian/pool/main/t/ttf-xxxxxxx repository which is 
ideal source for other distributions to grab from.

For the mgopen fonts, the individual location is 
http://www.ellak.gr/fonts/mgopen/, the Debian repository is 
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-mgopen

I believe that making a guide on releasing fonts by the GNOME Foundation 
or some other organisation would be a good step to get more fonts made 
open-source.
Based on this guide we could have press releases to the sort "New 
open-source font made available, thanks to our guide". With luck, more 
donations of fonts will take place.

Hope this long e-mail makes sense!
Simos

> Luis (who has gotten into the bad habit of brainstorming aloud on lists :)
>
> On 5/15/05, Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net> wrote:
>  
>
> > Hi,
> > Just to announce the availability of four Greek fonts, at
> > http://www.ellak.gr/fonts/mgopen/
> >
> > Why it matters to the marketing list?
> > There are limited non-latin fonts which are distributed as open-source.
> > It's important to populate the list of available open-source fonts for a
> > language, as they can be made available on any Linux distribution. A
> > graphical environment (such as GNOME) is made more appealing to the
> > end-user if there are beautiful fonts available.
> >
> > Until now, Greek GNOME users had freefont (FreeSerif and FreeSans) as
> > the only good quality proportional fonts for the graphical interface.
> >
> > All, these fonts were previously commercial and got recently donated.
> > The licence process chosen was that of the Bitstream Vera fonts, at
> > http://www.gnome.org/fonts/ initiated by the GNOME Foundation.
> >
> > Another example of a font distributed with a Bitstream Vera-style
> > license is Nafees Web Naskh (http://crulp.org/nafeesWebNaskh.html).
> >    
>
>
>  



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