{"id":"OFL-1.1","title":"SIL Open Font License 1.1","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL_web","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"created","summary":"The SIL Open Font License is the standard licence for open fonts: use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify, redistribute and sell, on condition that the font is never sold on its own, that the notice and the licence travel with every copy, that a modified version does not use a reserved font name and that the font software stays under this licence. Nothing here is legal advice.","findings":[{"rubric":2,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:target","description":"A font is a computer program and a work of design at once, so the record carries dalicc:CreativeWork and dcmitype:Software, the pair the review group uses for all four font records. The licence itself speaks of \"Font Software\" and defines it as \"the set of files released by the Copyright Holder(s) under this license\", which may include \"source files, build scripts and documentation\".","action":"applied"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The grant reads: \"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of the Font Software, to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify, redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies of the Font Software, subject to the following conditions.\" That is the permissive base set, including cc:CommercialUse and dalicc:chargeDistributionFee. The licence says nothing about patents or sublicensing, so neither is written.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"Three. dalicc:sellCopy, because condition 1 says \"Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself\"; this is a restriction on how a copy may be sold, not a ban on commercial use, which condition 2 expressly allows when the font is bundled with software. dalicc:promote, from condition 4, which bars the use of the names of the Copyright Holders or Authors to promote, endorse or advertise a Modified Version. dalicc:ChangeLicense, from condition 5: the Font Software \"must not be distributed under any other license\".","action":"applied"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"Condition 5 requires the Font Software, modified or unmodified, to be \"distributed entirely under this license\", which is cc:ShareAlike. Condition 2 requires each copy to contain \"the above copyright notice and this license\", which is cc:Attribution and cc:Notice. The duties hang on odrl:distribute, odrl:modify and odrl:derive rather than on the licence, because the last sentence of condition 5 takes documents made with the font out of the reciprocity: \"The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply to any document created using the Font Software.\"","action":"applied"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"dalicc:rename","description":"Condition 3 says \"No Modified Version of the Font Software may use the Reserved Font Name(s) unless explicit written permission is granted by the corresponding Copyright Holder\", which is dalicc:rename on odrl:modify and odrl:derive. It binds only where the copyright statement of the font actually declares a reserved font name; this record, the plain OFL-1.1 id, carries the duty because the clause is part of the licence.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"The disclaimer is split at \"IN NO EVENT SHALL\" into dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer and dalicc:LiabilityLimitation. dalicc:additionalClauses carries all five conditions and the termination sentence, so that a reader can see the wording the duties were read from.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"info","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"The licence names no governing law and no term, so cc:jurisdiction is dalicc:worldwide and dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"Two gaps. The termination sentence, \"This license becomes null and void if any of the above conditions are not met\", has no property; proposed dalicc:terminatesOnBreach. The reserved font name is a named string that the copyright statement declares, and dalicc:rename cannot carry which name is reserved; proposed dalicc:reservedName as a literal qualifier on the rename duty.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check of app.services.composer with the axioms of dg_default returned an empty list for this record.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"family","description":"OFL-1.1, OFL-1.1-RFN and OFL-1.1-no-RFN have one and the same licence text: the three SPDX plain text files are byte for byte identical. The ids exist to record whether the copyright statement of a particular font declares a Reserved Font Name. The three records therefore differ in exactly one triple, the dalicc:rename duty on odrl:modify and odrl:derive.","action":"none"}],"family":"Fonts and documentation","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"notes":"Modelled from the SPDX plain text and checked against the SIL URL in cc:legalcode. The definition of \"Modified Version\" in the source text uses two em dashes; the sentence is not quoted in this record, and no quoted clause carries a long dash."}