Symbola Font for Unicode No Longer Free (2018)

By Xah Lee. Date: .

Symbola Font for Unicode No Longer Free

Symbola font versions after 10.23 are no longer (libre) Free.

George Douros, created a lot unicode fonts. They had a license of “free for any use”. but since March 2018, the license changed to “free strictly for personal, non-commercial use”.

his site was http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ as of 2018-01-29

here's webarchive screenshots of his website and font license.

George Douros site 2017-07-20 webarchive 2023-06-21
George Douros site 2017-02-20 webarchive 2023-06-21 〔http://web.archive.org/web/20170720165326/http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/〕
George Douros site 2018-01-29 webarchive 2023-06-21
George Douros site 2018-01-29 webarchive 2023-06-21 〔https://web.archive.org/web/20180129230141/http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/〕
George Douros site 2018-04-20 webarchive 2023-06-21
George Douros site 2018-04-20 webarchive 2023-06-21 https://web.archive.org/web/20180420071257/http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/

quite interesting turn of events. George Douros is the guy who created the Symbola font, for years its the most popular and basically the only open source font for emoji. Now the license change is rather drastic. e.g. linux distro cannot use it as is.

2018-06-06 https://x.com/xah_lee/status/1004603690571874304

2018-06-05 thanks to https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/ for alerting on this license change.

symbola no free 2023-06-21 TsbwW
Symbola Font for Unicode No Longer Free [2018-06-05 from https://x.com/FakeUnicode/status/1004206237620113408 ]

font related misc articles