Licensing BetaType’s Ubuntu Font Correctly

I wrote the following short essay about font licensing for Christian Roberts who made an improved Ubuntu Titling font, which is originally released by Canonical under the LGPL2+.

(I am not a lawyer and this is personal opinion, but I hope it makes sense for you :-)

As I understand him, Gustavo is saying that, in his opinion, in the general case, there is no obligation for font developers to publish the scripts that they use to develop a font when they publish that font as free software.

In this specific case though, the situation may be different, because the Ubuntu font is licensed to you under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

This means that you are free to make modifications, on the condition that if you redistribute your modified version, you include the “complete” source code - including scripts, even though they are not derived works from the original work. You must also include a copy of the license, and it is courteous to do this whatever the license is.

Although these requirements might seem strange at first, this is the most popular way of licensing free software - it aims to guarantee that everyone is working on a level playing field :-)

However, this may not be the case: you could have looked at the Ubuntu font and then opened a new file in your editor and authored a totally new work.

If you did that, and none of the data points in your font are from Canonical’s font, you are totally free to decide whatever copyright license you will apply to the work when you distribute it to other people.

You said that you “would be most comfortable with the most permissive license possible” and that is the “Expat license.”

This is a good choice for a free font software license. I personally believe that all our choices come with an ethical responsibility to do good. I believe that for fonts, this means using a copyright license that respects every user’s freedom to share and modify them.

Of course, I respect your right to express views that are different from mine on this issue. I’m very happy and grateful that you’ve decided to publish your excellent work on this particular font as free software :-)

I do recommend reading about the Open Font License though, as famously used by Victor Gaultney in his “Gentium” font :-) It is very simple and permissive and I think you might like it.

However, since I’m not sure if some of the points in your font did come from the original Ubuntu font or not, and since you asked for an explanation, I’ll now explain how I understand the LGPL works :-)

The Ubuntu font has a copyright holder, like all font software does, and the copyright holder is the company called Canonical. That company has licensed this font to the public under the GNU Lesser General Public License, either 2.1 or 3.0 or any later version.

Version 2 is not very long and it is written in unusually normal “everyday” language, because it was not written by a lawyer (yet it is legally valid) - and I suggest everyone take the time to print it out and read it :-)

Sections zero and four are relevant here:

If the font software you are distributing on this page is a “derived work” of the font software distributed by Canonical - that is, you started with their outlines and make changes to some glyphs and remade others from scratch - then you are obliged to either

  1. Distribute the “complete source code,” and source code is defined to include “the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the library.”, or
  2. Not distribute the work at all.

I hope you’ll choose the first option :-)

Also, I’m aware that Canonical doesn’t distribute their source code in the first place. I hope they will sort this out soon; I know the designer and he told me he used FontForge originally, so there is a SFD somewhere :-)

A secondary issue that you’ve raised is that you used FontLab to make your modifications. Although FontLab “VFB” files depend on FontLab which is proprietary software, that does not effect the obligation to publish these source code files.

However, because VFBs require other people to use only FontLab, it leaves out people using other font editors - free or otherwise. Using a “standard” source code format that is supported by many font editors would be ideal.

The “UFO” format from the Robofab project is a strong candidate for this. Although it needs a few tweaks to support OpenType tables for the general case, those tables aren’t used in your lovely font as far as I know. If your next release can include the complete font as a UFO, instead of or alongside of the VFB files, that would be wonderful :-)

(Thanks to Gustavo for providing a UFO example of the current version; there is a discussion about this specific issue on the Open Font Library mailing list with Erik van Blokland (an author of UFO format specification) and George Williams (the primary author of FontForge) and in which you are most welcome to contribute :-)

If you have any specific questions about how to proceed, I’m happy to try answering them as best I can :-)

Cheers, Dave

Creative Commons License
The Licensing BetaType’s Ubuntu Font Correctly by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
January 5, 2008 |

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One Response to “Licensing BetaType’s Ubuntu Font Correctly”

  1. Why a (L)GPL Font Should Not Be Relicensed Under OFL: Understanding on January 5th, 2008 16:01

    […] I understand the LGPL, it is neccessary for LGPL fonts, which I’ve explained in depth in another post. The blog post Why a (L)GPL Font Should Not Be Relicensed Under OFL Copyright © David […]

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