STIX fonts for free mathematics - comments needed on draft license

[Matthew Seth Flaschen]

Comment sent.  Beyond your criticism I noted that the prohibition against sales of the isolated font was futile because someone could simply put it in a self-extracting zip, which is technically a larger software package(even if you're going by file size, which isn't the real meaning of the document, you can just turn off compression on the zip).  

-Matt Flaschen


> Dear OSI folks,
> 
> I noticed something where your input may be important.
> 
> As you may know, there is a major effort by a consortium of scientific 
> publishers and organizations, called STIX, to produce a comprehensive 
> royalty-free font for mathematical typesetting (with almost 8000 glyphs):
> 
>  	http://www.stixfonts.org/
> 
> These fonts are needed, for example, to fully support MathML in Mozilla 
> (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/), which cannot currently bundle 
> math fonts.
> 
> STIX is now almost complete, with the remaining 472 glyphs scheduled to be done 
> by October 2005, and they have recently released a draft user license for 
> comments:
> 
>  	http://www.stixfonts.org/user_license.html
> 
> Unfortunately, the license does not quite meet the open-source criteria. 
> It allows you to add glyphs to the font, as long as you release the new 
> font under a different name, but you cannot modify the existing glyphs 
> (even if you rename the font).
> 
> They are soliciting comments on the license (see above link), and I think it 
> would be good for the FLOSS community to get involved (politely).  The 
> intentions of the STIX people seem good, and I'm hopeful that they can be 
> persuaded that such license restrictions do more harm than good.
> 
> Cordially,
> Steven G. Johnson