Clean up licensing - Githubissues

RedHatOfficial / RedHatFont

Red Hat's Open Source Fonts - Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text

SIL Open Font License 1.1

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Clean up licensing #7

Closed richardfontana closed 5 years ago

richardfontana commented 5 years ago

This pull request does a few things:

Gets rid of MIT license notice in README.md and replaces with a reference to the SIL OFL 1.1 with clarification around trademarks.
Replaces OFL.md with LICENSE (so that automated license scanning tools can more easily identify the license)
Gets rid of the LGPL dual license since that seems unjustified
Uses the standard text of OFL 1.1, but also makes use of the "Reserved Font Name" feature
Fixes package.json to use a valid SPDX identifier for the license

richardfontana commented 5 years ago

I haven't looked closely at https://github.com/RedHatOfficial/RedHatFont/pull/4 but this probably addresses a superset of what's addressed there

starryeyez024 commented 5 years ago

@richardfontana this is indeed overlapping with the efforts of PR #4, can you comment on that PR and close it out in favor of yours please?

davelab6 commented 5 years ago

also makes use of the "Reserved Font Name" feature

I don't recommend this. Please use a TRADEMARKS file and a trademark notice appended to the line 1 copyright notice instead :)

richardfontana commented 5 years ago

also makes use of the "Reserved Font Name" feature

I don't recommend this. Please use a TRADEMARKS file and a trademark notice appended to the line 1 copyright notice instead :)

Can you explain why? I know you did so once several years ago but I've forgot your reasoning :-)

starryeyez024 commented 5 years ago

tagging @davelab6 for the above comment ^

richardfontana commented 5 years ago

Actually @davelab6 I think regardless of your reasoning in this case I believe we should use that feature. The reason is these fonts are unusual in using the "Red Hat" name. That is Red Hat's most valuable legal asset. Since the one desirable (from a sort of superficial community perspective) license of the three that confusingly seem to currently apply happens to have that RFN feature we (Red Hat) might as well make full use of it. As an alternative you can try to convince this team to rename the fonts. They have made the informed decision to use this name.

davelab6 commented 5 years ago

That's fine, but then Adobe and Google and possibly a bunch more people are going to need additional permission to use the RFN, since serving as a web font often means subsetting, and these larger companies may make other modifications. Do you have a process already set up for this, generally? I'll email you about the Google Fonts case

davelab6 commented 5 years ago

(The reason is that Google and Adobe would need to do this anyway, for the trademark, but the RFN just invites a lot of people who are less diligent to end up falling out of compliance, and the termination clause in the OFL is old school with no pleasant gplv3 style healing, so I think it should only be used very sparingly. It's not a big problem to work with RFNs, it's just adding friction which most of the time isn't helpful because if there is a registered trademark then the naming is already subject to policy, and most people want their font name used in close derivatives like subsets.)