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Comment by Ayesh | Hacker News Reader

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Ayesh

We should take a lesson from the FAQ about license. It is the simplest yet most useful one I have seen!

May I install JetBrains Mono on my system and use it in any code editor? -> YES.

May I make and print a poster with JetBrains Mono? -> YES.

May I use JetBrains Mono in my logotype? -> YES.

May I use JetBrains Mono on my website? -> YES.

May I use JetBrains Mono in my applications? -> YES.

May I design my own font based on JetBrains Mono? -> YES. In this case, you need to indicate that it is based on JetBrains Mono.

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Font licensing is not what we developers are used to, but they have done a fine job pointing this out in simple terms.

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Yeah I love this kind of license. It's basically a "do what you want but please don't rip us off without attribution".

If you want a new typeface to take off, this (and having a good typeface of course) is the way to do it.

That’s just a summary of the license, which is Apache 2.0, a software license.

Usually, fonts are licensed under SIL.[0] Maybe Jetbrains feel that their target audience is more familiar with Apache licenses?

[0] https://scripts.sil.org/ofl

IANAL - I am pretty certain you can do most of those things with all fonts regardless of license. Copyrights on fonts is almost non-existent. The only thing copyrightable is the actual "code" used in the font. (maybe delivering their files on a website is an issue?)

This is based on research I did years ago when dealing with a copyright legal case where I worked. The summation is that you can't copyright the alphabet, so fonts aren't copyrightable.

The only one I completely disagree with is the last one though. Requiring attribution for something not copyrightable is kinda silly.

That's interesting. Because most fonts are protected by a copyright-based license, that they don't seem to have any trouble enforcing.

How extensive was your research?

The actual code of a font (ttf, otf, whatever) is copyrightable. The shape of a font isn't, and AFAIK it isn't protectable by any form of IP. This means that while you can't redistribute or embed the TTF you got from a type foundry except as specified by the license, you are free to use it to create a near-perfect knock-off that doesn't share any code. This is where the fonts on all of those "Free Fonts" websites come from.

Thanks, that's useful information

It's basically as they said: Typefaces are indeed not copyrightable in the United States, but fonts are, in the same way other as other code/binaries.

In practice, much of the likely infringement stems from the font and its existing choices for curves and control points (plus nowadays more advanced features of the font like ligatures and alternate forms), not the typeface, so it's not quite accurate to say there's no protection, and stuff like the Open Font License does exist for a reason.

You can't copyright 0s and 1s, so it's okay to do whatever you want with any binary?

Not sure about zeros and ones, but there were some interesting copyright violation cases with long primes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

You can copy a font (as in, design another font that looks exactly like the original) and then do whatever you want. I think people call that tracing a font, and is very common with Helvetica, of which a lot of alternate fonts have made "clones" of.

But If I take a font file someone else made, not one I created myself to look like it, then its a whole other story. The font industry is cutthroat and quite lawyer happy, too (which is why tracing them to make your own is so popular...and brutally expensive if you hire a contractor to do it for you). You still usually come up ahead if you're a big company though by making your own.

It would be nice if that were to be the case, but it is not.

Almost all well known, professionally made fonts are licensed, with different cost based on the intended use of the font.

The font licensing FAQ page for Microsoft Windows system fonts is rather enlightening, as a starting point as Microsoft font licences are violated all the time.

It informs, among other, that for certain software licenses (Home/Student) you might not even be allowed to sell a printout you've made. Yeah, that's how strict font licensing is in general.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq

"This FAQ covers only the fonts Microsoft supplies with Windows as system wide resources"

Yet it doesn't answer the question "May I resell JetBrains Mono?"

I guess it's more clear from the Apache 2.0 summary: "JetBrains Mono typeface is available under the Apache 2.0 license and can be used free of charge, for both commercial and non-commercial purposes."

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