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cc-devel - Re: [cc-devel] Adding OFL support to XMP/liblicense

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Subject: Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

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  • From: Nicolas Spalinger <nicolas_spalinger AT sil.org>
  • To: Asheesh Laroia <asheesh AT creativecommons.org>
  • Cc: CC-devel <cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-devel] Adding OFL support to XMP/liblicense
  • Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:53:42 +0200
  • Resent-date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:49:17 -0700 (PDT)
  • Resent-from: Asheesh Laroia <paulproteus AT acm.jhu.edu>
  • Resent-to: cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org

Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Oct 2008, Nicolas Spalinger wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> A little while ago, Jon Phillips has recommended you as the ideal person
>> to talk to about adding Open Font License (OFL) support to
>> XMP/liblicense to be able to flag font and font sources with the license
>> both for users and designers. From the git/svn repos and the Debian
>> packaging I can see that there are already such definitions for GPL and
>> LPGL underway as well. Open fonts have a key role to play in the
>> Commons...
>
> Thanks! I do agree that open fonts have an important role to play in a
> free and open technology world!

Glad to hear that :-)

>> The description of the license is here:
>> http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
>>
>> It's a community-recognized license for fonts:
>> http://unifont.org/go_for_ofl/
>>
>> With the corresponding human-readable representation here:
>> http://scripts.sil.org/OFL#9ccf5052
>>
>> I'm attaching a draft rdf snippet of the machine-readable code.
>
> I put that on the web for people joining us late:
> http://labs.creativecommons.org/~paulproteus/draft-scripts.sil.org_licenses_OLF_1.1_.rdf
>
>
> Apparently the given sample isn't quite valid XML nor RDF, but I have a
> sense of what it means.

Oops, must have forgotten to run it through a validator. I'm very
willing to improve the current draft with your suggestions?

AFAICT ccREL encompasses RDF and XMP... How does XMP fit in?

> I noticed you created your own terms that mean "Derivatives" and
> "Distribution" and "Notice" and a few others. Do you intend to use a
> different vocabulary?

We intend to reuse the terms which are well-established in the CC
community and add the ones needed to express the specificity of the
particular license (the OFL is FSF and DFSG-validated BTW).

It's a question of hosting I guess, isn't it?
I'm not yet sure how a set of rights expressed by a particular license
definition and hosted by the maintainer of that particular license
should cascade to include other definitions hosted somewhere else... The
OFL cc-like expression is not officially recognized/affiliated with CC.
For example shouldn't the GPL/LGPL expressions point back to FSF/GNU as
the author/maintainer of the license directly? CC has links to the FSF
but what about the other licenses? How do we extend the liblicense
framework to take into account the MIT/X11 license for example?

> Also, I'm not really sure what we would do with the RDF file.

There are various formats used for fonts and font sources which could
usefully be flagged. One very useful scenario would be that such font
and font sources containing OFL-related metadata would show up with a
OFL emblem/ human-readable representation of the RDF in nautilus (via
liblicense-gnome) and provide clickable links from the fields with URLs.

At this stage the RDF can be part of an SVG rights expression (via
Inkscape).

> Can font files store embedded metadata about the license they are under?
> (That's
> a serious question!)

Yes, there are already fields in the OpenType spec to hold such information:
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_name.html

The NAME table has the following fields: Copyright notice, Trademark,
Manufacturer Name, Designer, Description; URL Vendor, URL Designer,
License Description, License Info URL

> I don't think it makes sense in the GUI chooser we bundle with
> liblicense to let people chose the OFL.

Font designers would like to be able to visually tag extended font
sources (with may not have metadata fields as such)
to differentiate them from other sources.

Also in the font viewer/manager we're planning we'd like to be able to
know and sort which fonts (and font sources) are open/are from that
designer/foundry and so on based on such metadata would be extremely
useful for users. For the font formats without existing metadata fields
RDF/XMP sounds like the ideal solution.

>> Let me know what you think the best way would be for such an approach,
>> what needs to be done and how I can help.
>
> I'm CC:ing cc-devel so other minds can think about this too! I do
> appreciate you getting in touch with me.

And I'm glad for your quick answer. The work you're doing is very
promising IMHO.

Looking forward to feedback fom the others.

> -- Asheesh.

Thanks,

--
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
https://planet.open-fonts.org


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