font-
face: caslon;
) does not create a
derivative work of that font. So why did we worry about font licensing
at all?
The situation we were considering was one where a font was embedded in
a document (rather than merely referenced). Embedding allows a
document to be viewed as the author intended it even on machines that
don't have that font installed. So, the document (a copyrighted work)
would be derived from the font program (another work). The text of
the document, of course, would be unrestricted when distributed
without the font.
This isn't an artifact of the GPL; it's just the way fonts work.
Proprietary fonts often explicitly forbid embedding. So, if you want
to send your document off to a printing service, the printing service
needs to buy another copy of the font.
I was unhappy with even this amount of influence for fonts, because
(a) it's rarely what font authors intend and (b) it's possible that
some applications do embedding behind the user's back. The situation
seemed to me to be similar to the case of the runtime libraries which
GCC automatically includes in its output (and which are licensed to
permit inclusion in proprietary software). So, I wrote the font
exception you see on our web site.
The reason the exception is so limited is that we're worried about
someone extracting a font from a document, and redistributing it.
Extraction is, in my view, the major issue that a font license must
confront. Because I haven't been able to come up with a license which
correctly handles embedding and extraction in all cases, I've
restricted this exception to unaltered fonts. This means that someone
can't use embedding as a way to distribute a modified version of a
font under restrictive terms. If you have suggestions for how to
write a license which better handles extraction, please let us know.
We haven't had time to give this as much thought as we've given some
of the other issues involved in free licensing. We're especially
interested in hearing from font creators at licensing@gnu.org.
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