[Openfontlibrary] FontEmbedding.com

[Dave Crossland]

2008/7/24 Christopher Fynn <cfynn at gmx.net>:
> Dave Crossland wrote:
>
>>>> They say that EOT will be a W3C specification.
>>> <http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/01/>
>> Microsoft can submit whatever they want to the W3C, that doesn't mean
>> it WILL become a specification.
>
> Adobe are supporting this as well - and from what I've heard it has
> fairly widespread support.

Depends who you ask, and what you mean by 'support.' Tom Phinney's
informal poll asked mainly proprietary-minded type designers and web
designers, and he dismissed the "disproportionally small but vocal"
critics. And although Adobe and Microsoft are pushing this behind the
scenes, there has been no favorable commentary on the www-style at w3.org
mailing list. Web developers understand why DRM is a plague on all our
houses, at least.

And the comments in the blog at FontEmbedding.com is also full of
unfavorable remarks.

> I'm wondering how restrictive or enforceable this is?

IANAL, and I'm not in a country with this stuff. But I've heard
Bitstream people voice an expectation for their pound of flesh.

> So far they don't seem
> to have taken any successful action to stop EOT & Microsoft's WEFT which has
> already been around for ten years

Microsoft and Bitstream almost certainly have a blanket patent cross
licensing deal. The only other developer to use the ideas monopolised
by their patents was Netscape, who also licensed the patent - and
Bitstream's implementation too, in fact.

> Meanwhile
> Bitstream seem have stopped pushing their PFR for web font embedding  (which
> anyway did not work complex scripts) - and seem to be concentrating on it's
> use in Digital Video and embedded devices.

Since web-browsers are a core part of Digital Video and embedded
devices, this is foreboding.

> seem to imply that this gets round the original font license.

All that is historic IMO: The proprietary beasts are so archaic, when
Bitstream was doing this 15 years ago they didn't want it done at all,
and Bitstream had to work around them.

> Of course Microsoft, Monotype, & Adobe also have number of patents of their
> own related to font embedding .

These are covered by the W3C's patent release, which is friendly to
free software.

Cheers,
Dave