While embarking on the multi-year journey to draft the OFL and coordinate the expert and community review of the license, we analysed the needs and the existing models, how they worked and how people reacted to them. With feedback from the community we made a list of features which are crucial for good font licenses and tried our best to condense them all into an ideal model for both users and designers to build upon.

These key features are:

• use, study, modification, redistribution (the 4 core freedoms)
• bundling
• embedding and its interaction with possible strong or weak copyleft requirements
• derivative outlines and artwork status
• derivative fonts status
• artistic integrity
• anti-name collision
• name and brand protection
• reputation protection for authors
• preventing stand-alone reselling within huge collections
• descriptive changes of modifications
• clarity and readability for designers
• awareness of the software nature of fonts
• the multiplicity of font source formats, some open and human-readable and some opaque/binary
• good integration with the font design toolkit
• legal solidity through wide expert and community review
• metadata integration
• cultural appropriateness to both the type and FLOSS communities
• stable trustworthy working model with a non-profit as the steward of the license
• being reusable and not project and .org-specific
• allowing linking in a web context (more recently)

There are of course differing views along the licensing spectrum but if you take into account the specific needs of collaborative font design then your criteria may well be in tune with the elements above.

With these criteria in mind, and taking into account the need for reducing licensing proliferation, where do existing font licensing approaches fit in? The following list has some of the existing licenses used for fonts out there along with some quick comments about problems the specific approach may have.

Don't get me wrong: for other uses many of these licenses are brilliant and do a fantastic job and I don't want to ignore the efforts by the corresponding authors or maintainers but with hindsight it seems there are probably better ways to release a font under a free software license.

• Public domain: no rights reserved not even attribution, unclear under various jurisdictions which makes it problematic for a global license, fairly often found to contain elements from restricted fonts where copyright has been stripped
• Utopia license: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• AFPL: Alladin Free Public License: deprecated and rejected as non-free by FSF and Debian
• Various Creative Commons combinations: designed to be used for content and not software
• Baekmuk License: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• Hershey font license: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• Liberation Font License: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• GPLv2 without exception: causing problems with embedding and satisfying source requirements
• GPLv3 without exception: causing problems with embedding and satisfying source requirements
• LGPL v2: confusing in terms of satisfying redistribution requirements
• LGPL v3: confusing in terms of satisfying redistribution requirements
• Bitstream Vera agreement: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• Lucida Legal Notice: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable
• MgOpen agreement: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable, a variation of the Vera license
• Arphic Public License: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable, very closely modelled on the GPL, some clauses are odd in the context of font design
• Design Science License: meant for data and not software: not endorsed by the FSF
• Mincho License: project-specific and organisation-specific and so non-reusable

If you know about font designers wishing to release their creations under a community-validated font-specific license, then I'd recommend you point them to the OFL FAQ and use the Go for OFL campaign materials to advocate a common license which many in the FLOSS community believe caters better to these needs.