Talk:SIL Open Font License

Latest comment: 3 years ago by Sobsz in topic GPL Compatible?

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I think the following sentence in the current article revision is hard to follow/understand:

"… a simple hello world program is enough to satisfy the license's requirement that fonts using the license be distributed with computer software."

Can this be rewritten for easier comprehension? HCed (talk) 19:16, 30 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

GPL Compatible?

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The article has an un-cited assertion that the license is GPL incompatible. But, the gnu.org license FAQ, which lists several licenses and whether they are compatible with the GPL, does not call this license incompatible. It calls it "harmless". http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SILOFL

 --2404:130:0:1000:5429:51D4:430E:94B0 (talk) 22:28, 8 September 2013 (UTC)Reply
I've removed the claim and the whole section as unreferenced. Diego (talk) 10:37, 23 December 2013 (UTC)Reply

the ofl section in the link is now accompanied by a dashed yellow line, which is explained as "incompatible with the gnu gpl" in the legend

it's odd that this isn't addressed in the text explicitly though, and given that i can't find info on this anywhere else i'm not sure whether to mention it or not Sobsz (talk) 23:08, 4 February 2021 (UTC)Reply

Not to be sold by itself

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This license's template was requested for deletion at Commons because someone thought it is a non-free license. There is a clause of prohibition of selling the font itself: "Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself."

It's an intersting question. I think the prohibition of selling the font itself doesn't necessarily mean it is non-free because:

Wikipedia works based on reliable sources. Several authorities about "freedom" of licenses, which you cited above, consider this a free software license, hence so should Wikipedia, very simply. LjL (talk) 18:16, 8 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

SIL

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Hi, could someone reformulate the first sentence. Indeed, it is written "The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is a free and open source license designed for fonts by SIL International for use with many of their Unicode fonts ...". However other organisations design fonts and release them under this license; this is for example the case of Google. Pamputt (talk) 06:26, 24 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

  Resolved by moving the text to a dedicated section about the font's history.--Roman Riabenko (talk) 10:47, 3 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

Reserved Font Name

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This article does not say what a modifier of a font should do to create a Reserved Font Name, ie does it need to be defined in a Reserved Font Name register (eg a wiki)? If so, where is that register? Or does the modifier of a font just make up a name, with the possibility that there will be a name collision with another font?FreeFlow99 (talk) 12:50, 2 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

It is part of the license text. The first line of the raw license is "Copyright (c) <dates>, <Copyright Holder> (<URL|email>), with Reserved Font Name <Reserved Font Name>." The font designer replaces "<Reserved Font Name>" in the license included in the font with the font name or portions(s) of he font name that they do not want to be reused by anyone creating a derivative version of the font (e.g. Joe Cool may declare "Joe Cool" as a reserved font name in his font called "Joe Cool New Roman", meaning that no-one could create a derivative font called "Joe Cool Super New Roman", but they could create a derivative font called "Snoopy New Roman"). BabelStone (talk) 17:35, 2 January 2020 (UTC)Reply