Talk:SIL Open Font License

Untitled
I think the following sentence in the current article revision is hard to follow/understand:

"… a simple hello world program is enough to satisfy the license's requirement that fonts using the license be distributed with computer software."

Can this be rewritten for easier comprehension? HCed (talk) 19:16, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

GPL Compatible?
The article has an un-cited assertion that the license is GPL incompatible. But, the gnu.org license FAQ, which lists several licenses and whether they are compatible with the GPL, does not call this license incompatible. It calls it "harmless". http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SILOFL --2404:130:0:1000:5429:51D4:430E:94B0 (talk) 22:28, 8 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I've removed the claim and the whole section as unreferenced. Diego (talk) 10:37, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

the ofl section in the link is now accompanied by a dashed yellow line, which is explained as "incompatible with the gnu gpl" in the legend

it's odd that this isn't addressed in the text explicitly though, and given that i can't find info on this anywhere else i'm not sure whether to mention it or not Sobsz (talk) 23:08, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Not to be sold by itself
This license's template was requested for deletion at Commons because someone thought it is a non-free license. There is a clause of prohibition of selling the font itself: "Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself."

It's an intersting question. I think the prohibition of selling the font itself doesn't necessarily mean it is non-free because:


 * It is approved as a free license by Free Software Foundation and by Open Source Initiative. See SIL Open Font License, FSF, OSI, Open Source Definition, The Free Software Definition.
 * You can sell a software package that includes the font according to OFL's FAQ.
 * Why won't the OFL let me sell the fonts alone? Because "the only people who ought to profit directly from the fonts should be the original authors" according to OFL's FAQ.
 * Some people consider that a GPL'd software itself cannot be sold, either. In this article, the author thinks "you can charge as much as you want for distributing, supporting, or documenting the software, but you cannot sell the software itself". --Tomchen1989 (talk) 10:09, 19 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia works based on reliable sources. Several authorities about "freedom" of licenses, which you cited above, consider this a free software license, hence so should Wikipedia, very simply. LjL (talk) 18:16, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

SIL
Hi, could someone reformulate the first sentence. Indeed, it is written "The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is a free and open source license designed for fonts by SIL International for use with many of their Unicode fonts ...". However other organisations design fonts and release them under this license; this is for example the case of Google. Pamputt (talk) 06:26, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
 * ✅ by moving the text to a dedicated section about the font's history.--Roman Riabenko (talk) 10:47, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

Reserved Font Name
This article does not say what a modifier of a font should do to create a Reserved Font Name, ie does it need to be defined in a Reserved Font Name register (eg a wiki)? If so, where is that register? Or does the modifier of a font just make up a name, with the possibility that there will be a name collision with another font?FreeFlow99 (talk) 12:50, 2 January 2020 (UTC)


 * It is part of the license text. The first line of the raw license is "Copyright (c),  (), with Reserved Font Name ." The font designer replaces "" in the license included in the font with the font name or portions(s) of he font name that they do not want to be reused by anyone creating a derivative version of the font (e.g. Joe Cool may declare "Joe Cool" as a reserved font name in his font called "Joe Cool New Roman", meaning that no-one could create a derivative font called "Joe Cool Super New Roman", but they could create a derivative font called "Snoopy New Roman"). BabelStone (talk) 17:35, 2 January 2020 (UTC)