Re: wanted: font archive

[Stefan Seefeld]

Antoine Leca wrote:
> 
> Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> >
> > I'm looking for some freely (as in GPL) available fonts.
> > What about setting up an archive of free fonts which can
> > be used with freetype ? I followed some links from your
> > pages but found the accompanying texts quite obscure wrt.
> > license terms.
> 
> There is quite a number of fonts that are floating around
> on Internet, but many many many fonts are just existing fonts
> that have been copied, more or less well, into new ones,
> with the name changed and perhaps some feature altered; the
> Copyrights over fonts in the U.S.A. are not very clear, and
> as the U.S.A. is by far the biggest market; so, one thing is
> sure with fonts: they are not free to use except if it is
> explicitely said this way by the *designer* (and you may have
> to search hard to spot the designer for a number of fonts).
> 
> Furthermore, very few font designers, which did a long job to
> hint the font, see a point in collecting the bucks from their
> primary client and then give the font for free on the Internet
> (sometimes, this is also restricted but the paying customer).

You just make my point. I think it is completely in the spirit of
the FSF to ask for an archieve of free fonts satisfying some
precisely spelled restrictions wrt. it's license. To have a
copylefted font engine is useless if there are no fonts being
distributed as free as the engine itself. I don't see how freetype
can be used in a free distribution without such an archieve.
Currently lots of fonts are distributed in a license gray zone.
May be if the FSF starts setting up an archieve, we will see
a useful set of copylefted fonts someday.

My point is completely practical: I found a number of ttf files
shipping with various open source distributions and I want to
set up an archive for the berlin project which contains at least
a couple of fonts people can download to use with berlin.
Unfortunately, not a single of the font files I found comes with
information about it's copyright. Since berlin is LGPL/GPL, we
of course need to require that all resources we rely on are compatible
with that.

Best regards,   Stefan
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Stefan Seefeld
Departement de Physique
Universite de Montreal
email: address@hidden

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      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...