[OpenFontLibrary] Windows 5k Name table restriction

[Chris Lilley]

On Friday, March 19, 2010, 10:45:22 AM, Nicolas wrote:

NS> Chris Lilley wrote:
>> On Thursday, March 18, 2010, 6:36:29 PM, Dave wrote:

>> DC> Hi, DC>  Interesting: this effects us, I think. A url of a
>> license is not DC> as ideal as the full license text, but I guess
>> will have to do.

>> I reported that back in August (thread title was "Verbose license
>> text in a font").

>> You responded that validators should be aware of that, maybe issue a
>> warning.

>> Nicholas responded to argue against vagueness in font licensing
>> (which seemed to me unrelated to a choice between embedding and
>> linking to the exact same license) and to argue against a "windows
>> limitation" having any impact on Libre Fonts.

NS> Mmm, what I really meant to say was that recommended best practises when
NS> designing and releasing open fonts do include properly filling in the
NS> metadata 

agreed

NS> and being more descriptive then your usual proprietary font.
NS> Licensing rights/freedoms/obligations as indicated by authors travel
NS> with the licensed item itself and don't rely on some pre-negociated
NS> remote obscure reference as is so common in proprietary restricted
NS> fonts: "font software foo in licensed to you by Foo foundry under the
NS> terms of the licensing agreement you have received".

Also agreed, but I didn't hear anyone proposing that. Having the text of the license embedded or on the other hand pointing to a well-known and stable location for the license are exactly equivalent.

And I didn't suggest either one, I just asked how common it was to have a license over 5k.

I note that the OFL site has links to the SIL license.


NS>  I don't see how
NS> different types of use should lead to inclusion of different texts in
NS> that field. Both the full text of the license and its external URL
NS> reference should be present inside the font sources. It is a requirement
NS> of all libre licenses that you don't strip away such copyright and
NS> licensing statements. 

If the original author included it, sure. Are you saying its mandatory to put the license as plain text inside each font?

NS> Certainly a requirement of the OFL to convey what
NS> the authors have decided to use as their licensing model for that
NS> particular font. You still need to know your rights/freedoms/obligations
NS> even if the network is unreachable. Also only recently are some tools
NS> able to reveal the URL fields in the font metadata, and it's not
NS> widespread yet (working on it).

Good to hear. Yes, we need more tools that do this.

NS>  The full licensing included in the font
NS> is therefore more important at this stage. Transparency and Digital
NS> Rights Expression turn out to be useful for everyone. This is why one of
NS> the focus of the successful WOFF format is also useful metadata
NS> placeholders.

Yes, it is. (And we need better examples there and more tools to include such licenses into fonts. I persuaded the fontforge folks to add woff support, but its still harder than it needs to be to include such metadata).


NS> Open fonts are not limited to a single platform and I expressed the
NS> personal opinion that this limitation from a particular platform wasn't
NS> a particularly good reason to change all that. IOW more like a bug to
NS> fix on that particular platform instead of a whole established best
NS> practise to change on all other platforms.

Ok, sorry if I musunderstood your reasoning there. But again, I wasn't suggesting any particular plan of action, just asking for data.

NS> I have lacked time to investigate all the details but (I can be totally
NS> wrong and this is my very own opinion) but I find it suspicious that
NS> because of "security reasons"  descriptive metadata (extremely useful
NS> for both users and other designers) should be excluded or strongly
NS> limited to the point of being useless: this particular field contains
NS> only text. Sounds fishy to me is all I'm saying.

NS> Who has a link to the MS security bulletin ID?
NS> Who has first-hand experience of the bug we are talking about?

I heard from Liam Quin yesterday that this has now been corrected.

>> Since I had merely asked for information, had suggested no change,
>> and since I was unaware that preventing Windows users from using
>> Libre fonts was a goal, I let the matter drop.

NS> No, we certainly don't want to exclude any particular platform from
NS> enjoying libre/open fonts: now matter how widely used it may be. But I
NS> guess we don't want any particular platform imposing problematic
NS> limitations on all the others either.

Fair enough.

NS> I think this limitation would impact way too many fonts and working to
NS> get the upstream bug fixed is probably a better approach.

Agreed.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your reasoning at length.






-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris at w3.org
 Technical Director, Interaction Domain
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG