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Fork: Bitstream licence to OFL #388

Open raphaelbastide opened 2 years ago

raphaelbastide commented 2 years ago

We are working on a fork of one of the Dejavu font. We are wondering if can be possible to change the original license Bitstream to OFL? OFL not perfect, but it is well known by designers and libre font users now, and we think it can be more clear for them, what they can and can’t do with the font.

alerque commented 2 years ago

I don't think re-licensing the existing fonts is possible at this point. It would be theoretically possible if all the contributors to the Bitstream, Alef, and Dejavu projects collectively agreed to relicense all their past contributions but pragmatically speaking that's unlikely to happen.

That being said given the terms of the Bitstream license I think you can create a derivative work pretty easily. From a cursory review it should even be possible to create a fork and license the release of that fork as OFL, but you also need to abide by the terms of the Bitstream license which means you need to include a copy of its terms with your distributions.

raphaelbastide commented 2 years ago

From a cursory review it should even be possible to create a fork and license the release of that fork as OFL

Yes, that’s exactly what we want to do, I realize now that my question was not clear enough. I don’t want to change Dejavu’s license, but just re-license our fork.

but you also need to abide by the terms of the Bitstream license which means you need to include a copy of its terms with your distributions

You mean by dual licensing the fork, and include both OFL and Bitstream license textfiles?

raphaelbastide commented 2 years ago

Just so you know, with Jérémy Landes @StudioTriple, we made a fork of DejaVu sans that can spread! https://gitlab.com/velvetyne/fungal

kimmus commented 2 years ago

Just so you know, with Jérémy Landes @StudioTriple, we made a fork of DejaVu sans that can spread! https://gitlab.com/velvetyne/fungal

404 :(

moyogo commented 2 years ago

Unfortunately this cannot happen unless Bitsteam and the authors of the other derivatives merged into DejaVu agree to change the license. Technically the DejaVu-only contributions are in public domain.

The first step would be to have Bitstream, now Monotype, change the Bitstream Vera fonts license to OFL.

raphaelbastide commented 2 years ago

@moyogo I didn’t know Bitstream is now Monotype. We ended by using the Bitstream License in the end, as it seems to be easier. But thank you for your clarifications.

@kimmus Sorry, it was piravate. It should be good now.

raphaelbastide commented 1 year ago

For your information, we will release the font Fungal today on Velvetyne Type Foundry. Specimen: https://fungal.page/

Thank you for your help! Thanks for DejaVu!