Font license issues

[Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya <meor dot ridzuan at gmail dot com>]

Salam,

Since Nadim does mentioned about license, maybe it's time for me to
write something about it. Before going into details, just to make
clear, the arabeyes_qr_meor font from the pakistanopensource site is
being distributed under GPL. This is because the font face was taken
from arabeyes-qr font, which is a forked from KACST font (GPLed). I
took the font face, made some modification to it, and develop a
totally new opentype table for it so that it can display the quran
properly. So, there is no issues of no font with GPLed. The font that
I have not release it is the one that I have not decide on the
license. This is the font that was used by Omar to generate the PDF,
which looks very similar to the Madinah mushaf.

Ok, now on the real issues. To me, the problem of releasing a font
under GPL is that , for font there is no source code involve. The
actual font is the source. You can get a native Truetype editor, make
changes directly to the font, and get a derivative of it. (fontforge
is not a native truetype editor, BTW). Thus, if I distribute a font
under GPL, there is nothing preventing anyone , even commercial
companies from distributing a modified font. They did not break any
license.

That might not seems to bad, but consider the following situation: One
company decided to use the font to be distributed with their own
application, let take the a Quran appication for example. For some
reason, they modify the font to suite their needs, and during the
process, some errors were introduced. This errror then resulted the
quran being displyed wrongly at a very specific place, and no one
notice it. Since the font is GPL, the font copyright is still with the
original author, but the author did not even know that the font was
modified by someone else. When the user look at the font, they will
see the author's name. So, who's going to be blame in this case? The
author did not have any case against the company since they did not
break any license. The only thing that the GPL requires them to do is
to distribute the souce code, which in this case , they did. So, to me
it seems more like the license have become either LGPL or BSD
derivatives.

So, this problem applies to the Quran XML files as well. I don't think
we can distribute it using GPL. We need something that will be adopted
by OSS distributor , but without some illegal modification that will
compromise the data.

SO far, I don't have any suggestion /solution. Maybe others might have
a better suggestion.


Wassalam.