The Open Font License & Promotional Campaign
moderated by Ed Trager
SIL International's Open Font License is a new FLOSS community license designed to specifically address the needs of font licensing, collaborative font design, embedding, bundling, artistic integrity, derivative fonts, and related issues. It is an FSF-recognized license and complies with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
The purpose of the OFL is to enable a wider open typographic community to spring up and grow by providing a free and re-usable license which makes sense to designers and which they can trust. Such a collaborative licensing layer will help fullfil the need for higher quality open fonts for screen and print and make the free desktop really multilingual by allowing designers to adapt existing fonts to enable new scripts. It is also designed to fill a need for lesser-known languages, complex scripts and typographic needs with low direct economic value and so empower language communities who were left out by proprietary vendors until now.
Think about Gutenberg's “movable type” in the context of the free desktop 
The free desktop already has some amazing font-related technologies, what is now needed is a coherent set of high-quality current-generation open fonts to complement the writing systems "stack". And ideally that open set needs to available as widely as possible for good document interoperability. The OFL exists to help designers and text layout components authors to achieve that goal.
Various font families released under the OFL are already packaged and available in the major distributions: OFL-ed fonts
This session will introduce the OFL and discuss the promotional campaign which is being jointly sponsored by Freedesktop.org, SIL International, Unifont.org, the Gnome Foundation, KDE e.V., the Free Standards Group, and the Free Software Foundation. The promotional campaign aims to interest font producers in releasing or re-releasing their fonts under the OFL. Using a common community-recognized license specifically designed for fonts will make it easier for existing projects to collaborate and for interesting branches to emerge and will encourage designers to join the movement.
Please visit the following links for more information:
Go for OFL! Campaign page on Unifont.org
At this session we will also be trying to recruit some volunteers to take responsibility for contacting specific font producers, so be ready to volunteer! Take a look at the OFL invitation letter template if you are interested in volunteering.
See this freedesktop wiki page to keep track of who to contact and who has already been contacted: http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Fonts/ProjectsUsingOpenFontLicense
Other elements worth discussing may be (depending on who is present):
- the font metadata fields (copyright, designer, URL, licence, etc) that we would like the font management systems to parse and display
- the FONTLOG: a suggested changelog format for font design
- font release best practises