These include everything from the well-know Creative Commons to licenses originally created for just a single font, like the Elvish Font License, created for Tengwar, which true Lord of the Rings fans may recognize as the script in which elven languages like Quenya and Sindarin are commonly written. The Fedora Project, for example, recognizes over twenty font licenses as compatible with inclusion in the project. In fact, the range of licenses which have been applied to fonts is broad, and sometimes confusing. But it’s not the only open source font license out there. The most common open source font license is the SIL Open Font License, often just referred to by its initials OFL.
If you’re creating a work you wish to share, then licensing matters to you, and you should understand how open source applies to the world of fonts. Do you have permission to use a font in commercial work, or in a public work at all? Can you even share that font with another person? Though typographers need to be concerned with their rights to modify and extend a given font, even you as an end user should be asking yourself some questions. When selecting a font, the decision process involves more than choosing between serif and sans serif: understanding how the font is licensed matters too. Fonts, like any other digital asset on your computer, come with their own rules for licensing.
