[OpenFontLibrary] Windows 5k Name table restriction

[Nicolas Spalinger]

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.

Mmm, what I really meant to say was that recommended best practises when
designing and releasing open fonts do include properly filling in the
metadata and being more descriptive then your usual proprietary font.
Licensing rights/freedoms/obligations as indicated by authors travel
with the licensed item itself and don't rely on some pre-negociated
remote obscure reference as is so common in proprietary restricted
fonts: "font software foo in licensed to you by Foo foundry under the
terms of the licensing agreement you have received". I don't see how
different types of use should lead to inclusion of different texts in
that field. Both the full text of the license and its external URL
reference should be present inside the font sources. It is a requirement
of all libre licenses that you don't strip away such copyright and
licensing statements. Certainly a requirement of the OFL to convey what
the authors have decided to use as their licensing model for that
particular font. You still need to know your rights/freedoms/obligations
even if the network is unreachable. Also only recently are some tools
able to reveal the URL fields in the font metadata, and it's not
widespread yet (working on it). The full licensing included in the font
is therefore more important at this stage. Transparency and Digital
Rights Expression turn out to be useful for everyone. This is why one of
the focus of the successful WOFF format is also useful metadata
placeholders.

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

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

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


> 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.

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

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

Cheers,


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org