Hi Herbert;
>________________________________ > From: Herbert Duerr <h...@apache.org> >To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org >Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 2:52 AM >Subject: Re: Adobe source Sans Pro fonts > >On 09.08.2012 22:55, Pedro Giffuni wrote: >> Of course it's too late for AOO 3.4.1 but Adobe has made available >> a new set of free fonts (as in OFL- which we temptatively classified >> Category-B) >> >> http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/08/source-sans-pro.html >> >> >> We should probably consider them for inclusion in AOO 3.5. > >That is great news, thanks for sharing. They look beautiful. > Actually I learned about them indirectly through imacat's fb :). FWIW, the LibreOffice and AOO packages in FreeBSD are both using the system fonts so I plan to package the fonts independently for FreeBSD. Adding the fonts in AOO is not urgent for me so if some other committer is in a hurry .. please go ahead ;). >> BTW, I am also aware that Liberation fonts are being rebased on >> the Google fonts and released under OFL. Right now there doesn't >> seem to be any advantage in switching them but maybe in the future >> we should. > >Most of the Liberation fonts have been relicensed under the OFL, with the >exception of Liberation Sans Narrow family, which had been contributed under >the restrictive license the other Liberation font faces were under. Until this >is resolved upgrading to the relicensed version would lose the Liberation Sans >Narrow font faces. > Here is an interesting comparison between the old Liberation and the Google croscore fonts: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/I18N/Liberation_vs_Croscore_fonts It seems to me like the Liberation guys simply renamed the Google fonts: if they orderly rebase their old enhancements on top of the renamed fonts then it may be a good idea to adopt the Liberation 2.x fonts. Well, we already don't carry the Liberation Sans Narrow font so "upgrading" we don't really lose anything ;). At the moment the Google fonts are the same as Liberation 2.0 so I don't see a need to update them, plus having the Chrome Fonts with different names to the Liberation Fonts is good if people need to install the Sans Narrow in Liberation 1.x. >As I accidentally have some insight of the problem here are the facts: >- their counterparts were GPL licensed, so they inherited this constraint >- they were produced during work time, so the designer's employer of that time >has the rights to them >- the designer would be happy with relicensing them to a permissive license >but only his ex-employer has the right to do so > At the time it was thought that the GPL could be commercially friendly but it is clear that the GPL, with our without exceptions, is an awful license for most things and specifically for fonts. This is also an issue for ghostscript fonts which are for all purposes stagnated. I think the licensing issue forced us to be a few months ahead of our time when we chose to move to the Google Chrome fonts. In the future I think it would be nice to have some kind for hosting services like Google's Web Fonts: https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/developer_api Just dreaming, perhaps ;). Pedro.
