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OFL Feedback

Nicolas Spalinger & Victor Gaultney, 2005-08-15

Some of the community feedback we've received on the SIL Open Font License.

Most discussion happens on the OFL mailing lists.

Subscription information and full archives can be found there.

Please join and give us your thoughts as well.

OFL 1.1

The Open Font License version 1.1 has now been released along with an updated FAQ. A lot of community input from various experts has enabled us to refine the license. The discussion which has taken place over the past few months has been very fruitful.

Thank you all for helping make the OFL a good model for collaborative font design that is both clear and easy to use. We are confident this license is a solid foundation for the open font movement to grow.

The next step is the Go for OFL campaign. Check it out and invite designers to contribute.

OFL 1.1-review2

Following on from 1.1-review1, we have released version 1.1-review2 to clarify a few expressions and iron out some possible ambiguities with another round of community review.

We have continued to receive insightful feedback from the various reviewers through email and face-to-face discussions at various FLOSS conferences.

While experts in the community were reviewing the minor revision, various font designers have been using the OFL to release their fonts.

OFL 1.1-review1

The SIL Open Font License version 1.0 is a good license, and we recommend its use. It has been embraced by designers, approved by FLOSS legal experts, and welcomed by the FLOSS community at large.

Nevertheless, we do see room for improvement. We have taken into account much of the feedback we received and have written OFL 1.1-review1. These improvements were worked out at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon (France) in March. These revisions do not change the intent of the license - they just clarify how the intent is expressed.

Please review this new version and give us your feedback via the OFL-discuss mailing list. At the end of May we will end the review period and come up with a final version to replace version 1.0.

OFL 1.0

The Open Font License version 1.0 has now been released and we are now in touch with various package maintainers from the majors distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, Fedora, Mandriva) for inclusion of fonts released under the OFL.

OFL 1.0-review2

Various reviewers gave us their thoughts and suggestions and encouraged us to continue our work in the area of free and open typography.

More constructive feedback on the refined 1.0-review2 version was received via email and through personal meetings like the ones which happened during the second phase of the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) in Tunis.

The discussion continues and we will be taking into account what the community at large thinks for the future refinement of the license.

OFL 1.0-review1

We received some appreciative comments along with constructive feedback from the various experts we consulted on the first public round of public discussion around OFL version 1.0-review1.

Overall, the model was well received by the various key members of the community who took time to review our model. They saw the value of what we wanted to give to the community and what the OFL could achieve in terms of improving the state of typography on the free desktop and beyond.

We have now refined the license and its FAQ by looking at the suggestions we received both privately or through the OFL-discuss mailing-list.

We improved the expression of the intent of our working model in various places and simplified other elements which could have caused unexpected problems.

The Open Font License in the news

Here is a small selection of links to articles recently published on community newsites, forums and personal websites about Gentium and other fonts under the Open Font License:

Gentium: An award-winning font joins the free software world - newsforge.net

Gentium Fonts Re-released Under New Free License - scribus.net

Time for a free font website? - typophile.com

Let there be open fonts - graphicdesignforum.com

Gentium Goes Open - tidbits.com

Gentium on wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org

The LocalisationDev wiki - wiki.localisationdev.org

Ed Trager's Unicode Font Guide - unifont.org/fontguide

Typeforge's links section - typeforge.net

the Fontforge FAQ - fontforge.sourceforge.net

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