Re: Font license issues

[Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>]

Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
> 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
...
> 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.

I see several issues involved in certification and licensing:

	1.  The encoded text itself.
	2.  The font.  You need to certify that the font has the glyphs and the 
Opentype tables necessary to render the encoded text properly.
	3.  The font services provider.  You need to certify that the font 
service provider properly interprets the font; I don't think all font 
engines understand all Opentype features.  (Obviously Freetype is the 
candidate here).
	4.  The rendering client.  You need to certify that the client software 
correctly manages the encoded text and correctly requests the right font 
services and correctly displays the result.

That's if you want to certify the entire toolchain involved in rendering 
 Quranic text.  Then you can offer some kind of assurance that what the 
viewer sees is what you intended, so long as the certified toolchain is 
used.  Of course, the user could use any toolchain to view the text, but 
you can explicitly note that the results are then not warranted. 
Ideally, one would bundle the entire thing in one package.

-gregg