Almost every font on this site is under the SIL Open Font License. It is two pages long, it is written in plainer English than most licences, and almost nobody reads it — so the same four questions come up again and again, usually with the wrong answer attached.
This is not legal advice. It is a description of what the licence text says, with the parts people get wrong pointed at.
Yes: commercial work, with no fee and no credit
You can use an OFL font in paid client work, in a product you sell, in an advertisement, in a film, in a book, on packaging and on a website. There is no fee, no registration and no attribution requirement — you do not have to credit the designer anywhere a reader can see. Many people do anyway, and that is a courtesy rather than an obligation.
Yes: logos and trademarks
This is the one that gets asked most and doubted most. You can set a logo in an OFL font and trademark the result. The licence covers the font software — the file — not the shapes you make with it. Setting a word in a typeface does not give the typeface designer a claim on your mark, and the OFL does not attempt to create one.
What you cannot do is claim the font itself. Trademarking your logo is fine; trademarking the typeface is not yours to do.
Yes: modify it
You can open the file, change the letters, add characters, subset it down to the twenty glyphs your site actually uses, and ship the result. Subsetting is a modification in the licence’s terms and it is entirely permitted — it is what every web font service does.
Two conditions come with modifying. The modified version stays under the OFL: you cannot take an open font, change it, and release the result under a closed licence. And if the original carries a Reserved Font Name, your version has to be called something else. That is the condition people trip over.
The Reserved Font Name
Some OFL fonts reserve their name. If a font’s licence names it as reserved, any modified version you distribute must not use that name. You may say what it was derived from, but the modified file cannot go out calling itself the original.
The reason is reputational rather than commercial: it stops a broken or half-finished derivative circulating under the designer’s name. It only applies when you distribute a modified version. Subsetting a font for your own site and serving it is not distribution in the sense the licence means, and nobody has ever been troubled by it.
No: selling the font file on its own
This is the only genuine prohibition. You cannot sell an OFL font by itself, and you cannot sell a bundle whose value is the fonts — a "1,000 fonts for $19" pack of open fonts is what the clause exists to prevent. Selling something you made with the font is entirely fine, and so is selling software that happens to include it.
The condition that travels with the file
When you pass the font file on — bundling it in an app, putting it on a server, including it in a template you sell — the licence and the copyright notice have to go with it. That is why every download on this site has the licence file inside the zip, and why removing it before you redistribute is the one easy way to be in breach without meaning to be. The licences page has the full text and the differences between the OFL, the Apache license and the UFL.
The short version
- Sell work made with it: yes.
- Use it in a logo and trademark that logo: yes.
- Credit the designer: not required.
- Modify or subset it: yes, staying under the OFL, and renaming it if the name is reserved.
- Sell the font file itself: no.
- Keep the licence with the file when you pass it on: required.