Issue 89686

Summary: Clarifying licensing (and related metadata) for opensymbol
Product: Installation Reporter: yosch <nicolas.spalinger>
Component: codeAssignee: AOO issues mailing list <issues>
Status: ACCEPTED --- QA Contact:
Severity: Trivial    
Priority: P3 CC: hdu, issues, michael.ruess, nesshof, nospam, ooo, thb, weko
Version: OOo 3.0 Beta   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Issue Type: TASK Latest Confirmation in: ---
Developer Difficulty: ---
Attachments:
Description Flags
new version 1.13 of OpenSymbol Font none

Description yosch 2008-05-20 16:01:58 UTC 
The opensymbols font lacks licensing information:

The corresponding fontforge source files (and the resulting binary font file)
only have copyright information:
installation/extras/source/truetype/symbol/OpenSymbol.sfd

A embedding-aware font license like the OFL (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL) would
be a good solution.
Comment 1 hdu@apache.org 2008-05-21 09:01:54 UTC 
@ih: yosch has a good point, reassigning
Comment 2 nospam 2008-06-02 11:24:32 UTC 
IH: Will be fixed in the next Extras CWS for OOo3.0
Comment 3 nospam 2008-06-05 17:14:05 UTC 
Created attachment 54269 [details]
new version 1.13 of OpenSymbol Font
Comment 4 yosch 2008-06-06 13:41:47 UTC 
Thanks for making the changes. 
You should also fill in the license and license_URL fields.

But the LGPL is still fairly problematic with fonts especially wrt. the
embedding problems. It's really not designed with fonts in mind. A PDF document
containing elements of a font under LGPL is more of a Combined Works than an
aggregate. I don't think we want to force users redistributing that PDF to have
to be subject to LGPL 4d0 or 4d1 (conveying Minimal Corresponding Source and
Corresponding Application Code // conveying Corresponding Source or installation
information).

IMHO you really need a font-specific exception to deal with that or as suggested
earlier a font-specific license which deals explicitly with embedding and does
not influence the license of the resulting document like the OFL (wich is
FSF-validated and widely used for fonts).

Choosing the OFL would also permit taking in the extra symbols from other open
fonts like Marvosym: http://www.marvosym.com/ and enrich the symbols offering
for OOo.
Comment 5 nospam 2008-06-06 13:56:10 UTC 
@yosch: I am using Fontforge to edit the font. I could not find specific fields for license and license URL - 
tihs is why I used the copyright field to enter the text. Do you have an idea?

@mh and ka: what to you think of yoschs comments about the license?
Comment 6 Martin Hollmichel 2008-06-06 14:14:05 UTC 
reassign issue to myself, I will take care of this.
Comment 7 yosch 2008-06-06 14:16:03 UTC 
To add the License field in FontForge:

- in the Menu: Elements-> Font Info...
- In that dialog: select the TTF Names entry on the left. 
- Click on New. 
- Scroll down (by keeping the mouse down) to English (US) for the language of
the field
- Left-click in the String ID column for that row and choose License field
- Right-click in the String column for that row and select Import to put the
desired license text in the String for a separate file.

Same idea for License URL.

You may consider Vendor URL and Designer / Designer URL too.

(BTW, you can see there's an OFL button right there too to make it easier to
populate the fields with the right metadata if you want to release your font
under OFL. It's recommended by the fontforge author).
Comment 8 Martin Hollmichel 2008-08-01 10:40:35 UTC 
relicensing opensymbol under OFL is in progress, but it is not likely that this
will happen in time for 3.0. setting 3.1 target.
Comment 9 Pedro Giffuni 2012-10-27 19:37:54 UTC 
This belongs to Andrew.
Comment 10 Marcus 2017-05-20 10:55:15 UTC 
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".