Tahoma Font License

[Scott Ritchie]

On 05/25/2011 09:27 AM, Maarten Lankhorst wrote:
> Hi mark,
> 
> 2011/5/25 Mark Page <rombust at hotmail.co.uk>:
>>
>> I am a bit confused by the Wine "tahoma" license: "Wine Tahoma Regular" ... GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1
>>
>> It would be useful to add the font to the ClanLib SDK resources (ClanLib has a zlib style license)
>>
>> It is not clear how a font can be licensed using LGPL, since LGPL is based around software libraries.
>>
>> Ideally I feel it should have a creative commons license
>>
>> I believe Creative commons did not exist when that font was created
> tahoma.sfd: Copyright: Copyright (c) 2004 Larry Snyder, Based on
> Bitstream Vera Sans Copyright (c) 2003 by Bitstream, Inc. Font renamed
> in accordance with former's license. Please do not contact Bitstream
> Inc. for any reason regarding this font.
> 
> So just look up the original without contacting bitstream inc. ?
> 

The topic of relicensing wine fonts has come up before.  Usually the
discussion ends with "our fonts aren't as good as you think, and you
probably don't want them so don't worry about licensing."

I'm not so sure it's true anymore.  Symbol replacement, for instance,
can actually be useful to show special characters on web pages that
would otherwise come up as question marks.

-Scott Ritchie