Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Re: teeworlds not free software

[Karl Berry]

Hi Karl,

    be worked around it 'with a simple hello world'. I find it kinda silly,

The non-silliness comes in when you see how font knockoff sites operate:
they copy font x from somewhere and throw it into their production
process to sell it (under their own proprietary terms) on their web
site.

The condition, silly as it is to you and me, stops them from using such
a standard process, because they don't have permission to just sell the
font as-is.

Clearly, they could "improve" their process to insert hello.c into the
distribution, but it is a nontrivial barrier for them; they don't live
in a world of source tarballs and configure && make.  They live in a
world of font suitcases and opaque binary font formats.

I'm not aware of any knockoff sites that have actually done it;
apparently dealing with OFL fonts isn't worth the cost for them, or they
don't understand what they have to do.  Either way, evidently the SIL
folks who wrote the license accomplished their goal (stop OFL'd fonts
from being on the knockoff sites), for now at least.

Best,
other-karl