- From: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 19:35:37 -0700
- To: Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>
- Cc: www-font <www-font@w3.org>, "Levantovsky, Vladimir" <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com>, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>, Dave Crossland <dave@lab6.com>
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Thomas Lord<lord@emf.net> wrote: > On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 17:52 -0700, Thomas Phinney wrote: >> Of course, if you want to take Microsoft's disinterest in supporting >> naked TTF/OTF fonts on web servers as a declaration of war, that is >> your perogative. > > How else could one possibly take it? As a disinclination to support something that they believe would be bad for the overall font developer ecosystem. >> significantly reducing the >> revenue type designers get from anyone except those big corporations >> that can't be seen participating in font piracy. > > That is hardly what's at stake here. You may be right, but what's important is that my statement is how the large majority of font vendors perceive it. That is what they're afraid of. I would infer that Microsoft either agrees with them, or at least thinks it's worth placating them. For my part I don't know. It's an open question whether the increased sales (from new uses for fonts) would outweigh the increased piracy if raw desktop fonts on web servers was a fully-embraced standard. The font vendors could be right, or you could, and it's hard to tell without simply trying it to find out. They don't want to take that chance, really, so most are not going to permit that kind of usage in their licensing terms any time soon. Cheers, T
Received on Thursday, 2 July 2009 02:36:18 UTC