[Pkg-ofl-fonts-devel] Merging font teams and share knowledge?

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Christian Perrier wrote :
> Hello,
> 
> During the OpenOffice.org conference, I had a very interersting talk
> with Nicolas Spalinger who indeed made me discover the work of the OFL
> fonts packaging team.

Hi Christian and everyone,

It was very good to meet you at the OooCon in Lyon.

I was going to send such a invitation to collaborate (along with links
to the various things we discussed in Lyon tomorrow) but looks like you
were quicker than me!

> I learned a lot about OFL (Open Font license) and the work done by SIL
> about fonts.

This page present the licensing model which has been validated by the
FSF and the Debian and Ubuntu ftpmasters:
http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

And this one lists the fonts currently released under OFL:
http://scripts.sil.org/OFL_fonts

The Unifont.org project has a great list of free/libre/open fonts:
http://unifont.org/fontguide/

> We both agreed that we really should share the knowledge about fints
> and fonts packaging. Having two font packaging teams in Debian sounds
> a bit weird.
> 
> From my current knowledge, the font team I created a few months ago
> has a lot to learn from the OFL fonts packaging team...and the
> opposite is also probably right.
> 
> What do you think about us working out to merge both teams into one?

I totally agree with you and I'm all for joining our efforts and working
together to improve the font landscape in Debian, in d-i as well as in
other places on the desktop. There will be another big step forward to
extend the number of well-covered / well-rendered languages and allow
more people around the world to enjoy Debian in their mother-tongue.

I will look at the bugs we discussed.

Most of the work of the pkg-ofl-fonts team is available in this svn
repo: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-ofl-fonts/

> For instance, some of the font packages we maintain could be worked to
> adopt the OFL license instead of the probably less well suited GPL or
> LGPL ones. From what I've understood right now, OFL is really meant
> for fonts and can probably make font designers less reluctant to
> release their work as free "software".

Exactly. This is the goal of the OFL: getting more designers to release
their fonts under a recognized free license that makes sense to them and
that encourages collaboration.

Various organisations in the community (freedesktop.org, SIL,
Unifont.org, GNOME, KDE, FSG, FSF) are preparing a campaign to encourage
designers to consider releasing their work under the OFL and use it as a
common base for collaborative font design.

I'll send more details about this effort soon.

> Please comment by keeping both lists CC'ed (this may trigger some work
> for the moderators, but well....).

I have also cc-ed people interested in fonts on the Ubuntu and GNOME side.


Have a nice day,


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger
http://scripts.sil.org