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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

This comes close to dancing around the Open Source Definition (http://opensource.org/osd.html/) I think. The restriction on "not sold by themselves" would seem to be a violation of the "No Restriction on Fields of Endeavor" requirement. But it's close.

It seems like a silly restriction anyway. What advantage would someone gain over Adobe by selling freely available fonts "by themselves" with no added value?

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For what its worth the license is Debian approved:

"The following restriction on distributions, which is part of OFL, has been widely accepted by open source projects when it is applied to fonts:

    1) Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, 
       in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself."* [1]

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses/#The_Open_Font_License

"What advantage would someone gain over Adobe by selling freely available fonts "by themselves" with no added value?"
The price it sold at. Just like people sell public domain texts, or even chunks of wikipedia as Amazon ebooks, with no added value.

I think its designed to keep someone from taking the work, and selling it as their own. If you look at fonts, there are hundreds of thousands of unique fonts being sold individually.

Well, sure. But these fonts are already open source. So who would buy it when they can get it for free from Adobe? This is like the resellers of free software on ebay. Sure, you can sell to a few dummies. And it's a little annoying. But it's not something that's going to hurt Adobe or its image meaningfully. Why bother polluting your license with this restriction?

If it's only going to affect people selling free stuff to ignorant people, why complain about the restriction? Wouldn't reducing people essentially scamming be a worthy reason for having that clause?

One good reason to complain about the restriction would be that it's a potential violation of the open source definition and a GPL-incompatible "additional restriction" on redistribution. And because it's just dumb.

FWIW, OFL is an FSF-approved license http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SILOFL. Also it was not written by Adobe, Adobe here just picked the most widely used free software font license.

So that people who don't know better don't get screwed. That seems like a worthy goal to me.

If there is no added value, by definition, there would not be an advantage for the buyer.
The only added values I can think of would be the traditional reason why people used to buy CDs with freely available software:
- the seller delivers the stuff cheaper than if the buyer downloaded it themselves (highly unlikely nowadays, but maybe there are corners of the world where this still applies)
- the seller acts as a curator, sifting the gold from the junk, so that the buyer need not do that.
The 'curator' role might still be worth something. For example, a site could have a link 'do you like the template/icons/font we use? Buy it here'. That would be forbidden by this license (but selling all three in a package, or even two fonts with this license in one package, would be fine, at least in a literal interpretation of the license)

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