Closed twardoch closed 3 years ago
This issue is replicated in all three projects:
Which benefits, after this effort?
The benefits include much easier ability to combine names from these sources. Right now taking some data from one source and some from another forces you to repeat the full license texts of all three projects.
For example, since this repo contains
it actually should also contain
https://github.com/schriftgestalt/GlyphsInfo/blob/master/LICENSE
but doesn't.
But after unification, if GNUFL contains data from AGLFN & any data from GlyphsInfo, its license could simply say:
Copyright 2002-2019 Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/)
Copyright 2016 LettError and Erik van Blokland, TypeMyType and Frederik Berlaen
Copyright 2016 Georg Seifert
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or
without modification, are permitted provided that the
following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of
its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written
permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND
CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES,
INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE
DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR
CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT
NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;
LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN
CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS
SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Since the data is very similar in nature, a “license commons” is the best approach. Reduces entropy, simplifies things, helps you not worry about the license stuff.
Seems that Read is willing to do the change in AGL+AGLFN. I also chatted with Rainer recently, and he indicated that Glyphs might be willing to change their license as well.
For GNUFL, the change is really minimal — just unifying the text verbatim with Adobe’s. Since Adobe is least free to do changes (as it's a big corp), I've proposed the changes in a way that should be most friendly for each of the three projects.
Basically, imagine that BMP dataof Unicode were available under a different license than the SMP data. That would be rather tedious for users and unnecessarily complicate things.
GlyphData.xml
and AGD.txt
are only used for some comparisons. Their names are not included in the GNUFL lists. We can just remove the two files from the repo.
I think that would be wise just to follow the law.
The other aspect (unifying licenses for the three repos, which for AGLFN & GNUFL really means just a cosmetic change that does not affect the terms, while for GlyphsInfo it actually does mean switching from MIT to FreeBSD) still would have “commons“ benefits.
I.e. if these three repos had the same license, you wouldn't even been need to think whether you need to keep or remove that .xml. You still could, but for reasons othee than "reducing legal conplexity". :)
AGD.txt and GlyphData.xml have been removed from this repository. The code will still look for them for testing and reference.
I’d like to propose that AGL&AGLFN, glyphNameFormatter and GlyphsInfo adopt the same license text, the "BSD 3-Clause Revised License", unified in the way that I’m proposing below.
AGLFN
Currently, https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/agl-aglfn/blob/master/aglfn.txt is licensed under the "BSD 3-Clause Revised License" as follows (it mentions "Adobe" explicitly in the 3rd clause):
glyphNameFormatter
Currently, https://github.com/LettError/glyphNameFormatter is licensed also under the "BSD 3-Clause Revised License". Virtually identical to Adobe’s, but uses the generic "copyright holder" in 3rd clause.
GlyphsInfo
Currently, https://github.com/schriftgestalt/GlyphsInfo is licensed under the "MIT License":
Suggestion
If possible, I’d like to suggest that all three projects change their license as follows:
Then followed by this identical text:
Effectively:
We’d gain from this that all three projects would have an identical license, so any composite data made from those projects could simply be credited as:
plus potential additional contributors, followed by the same text.
I think this would simplify things a lot.