Title: Bitstream Charter Date: 2006-02-12 18:39 Author: Femke Tags: Type, Libre Fonts, Licenses Slug: bitstream-charter Status: published To my surprise **Bitstream Charter**, one of the few usable Open Source fonts around I know of, is currently published on myfonts.com with the following licence: [![no modifications]({filename}/images/uploads/2006/02/noMod.jpg)]({filename}/images/uploads/2006/02/noMod.jpg) [Florian Cramer](http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70/) explains what is really going on: > "That's true, but the license change refers to a newer version of > Bitstream Charter. A copyright owner of a work is free to change the > licensing terms any time, either rendering a formely free work > proprietary or vice versa. But a license change can never be > retroactive, i.e. it can't affect the licensing terms of a previously > released version of the same work. (Same happened to SSH for example: > The original SSH continues to be developed as proprietary software, > whereas OpenSSH - included among others in Mac OS X and Linux - was > developed on the basis of an older, free version of the original SSH > package.) > > An older version of Bitstream Charter was donated to the X Window > system and continues to be available under the extremely liberal > MIT/X11 license. In Debian and Ubuntu, the font is part of the package > "xfonts-scalable" which is in the fully free standard distribution. > > (...) > > The > "[Gentium](http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium&_sc=1)" > font is another interesting typeface that just has switched to a free > license. However, the license is still under review by Debian. It's a > classicist font that looks more conservative than Charter, but it > offers a greater number of international glyphs."