RE: Announcing new font compression project

Dave Crossland wrote:

> MSIE has always supported MTX compresion in EOT; My recollection of
> what happened is that what John said is correct, and that it wasn't
> clear that the OTHER browsers would make use of it even if the patent
> issue was resolved because of the DRM issue that I and others kicked up
> a fuss about. The "EOT Lite" proposal by IIRC Ascender was in response
> to that, but didn't get much traction.

To report what I saw and read and heard:

At that time, by any sensible measure and from any viewing angle, the patent had no positive value in the marketplace. All it did was make compressed EOT files hard to come by because of possible infringement. This inconvenience affected nobody except the users of IE6, 7, and 8 because, in the absence of a convenient method of making true compressed EOT files, they were the users who bore the brunt of font files twice as big and taking longer to load. On the flip side, developers likewise had to post files that were larger than necessary had the patent not stood in the way.
I don't think anyone doubts that had Monotype not had the method patent on MTX, cross platform tools to make compressed EOT's would have been generally available.

Although aware of the problem, Microsoft did nothing to alleviate it and neither did Monotype. (Please, anybody, correct me if I missed something.)

After the panel discussion about web fonts at TypeCon 2009 in Atlanta, I went up to the representative from Monotype (whose name I'd have to look up, it wasn't Vladimir. And the conversation wasn't contentious, either, it was very pleasant and I liked the guy a lot.)
I asked him this: since they had expressed a willingness to take the patent "public domain" (or its equivalent) if the W3C adopted EOT as a standard, why didn't they drop the precondition and just do it? (And in so doing, abide by the W3C's rules for even having the notion of EOT as a standard considered, BTW.)
After all, what good was the patent doing Monotype? EOT had lain dormant for twelve years as a niche aspect of Internet Explorer. It was dead as a doornail. It was earning nothing. So why not use it to build good will?

The answer I got led me to the following suppositions:

The problem was not that the patent had a positive value in the market. The problem was the cost in setting it "free".
1) The patent was undoubtedly being carried on Monotype's books as having a value and that value would have to be written off or accounted for in some way if the patent went "public domain".
2) There were legal costs involved in changing the patent's status to make it clearly free to use.

It was simple: they didn't want to incur these costs unless they absolutely had to. I presume that if EOT had won the day instead of WOFF they would have felt they had gotten something in return. But it's really unclear to me what that payoff would have been other than psychological.
All along, the main concern was putting a "garden fence" around installable OTFs and TTFs and here we are today with every major browser supporting "raw" OTF/TTF files despite those efforts. If you're running a server with GZIP, technically, WOFF is just a bother and EOT just a necessity to accommodate legacy users.

But heck, with the word "assurance" being bandied about, maybe somebody knows something that I don't.

What IS the quid-pro-quo arrangement between Google and Monotype on this besides a better world?
Did Monotype's opening up of the MTX license precede collaboration with Google or was it a precondition?

And how is the change in MTX licensing being accounted for and/or justified to Monotype's stakeholders?

Anybody know?

Good luck with the R&D, truly. At the present rate of change, I'm expecting support for these screaming streams of glyph data to be flying into Chrome by no later than the end of the week!

Regards,

Rich 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: d.crossland@gmail.com [mailto:d.crossland@gmail.com] On Behalf Of
> Dave Crossland
> Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 10:08 PM
> To: rfink@readableweb.com
> Cc: John Hudson; www-font@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Announcing new font compression project
> 
> On 28 March 2012 15:20, Richard Fink <rfink@readableweb.com> wrote:
> >>they didn't want to give up their IP without assurance that there was
> >>a point to such a move.
> >
> > Hmmm.... helping out a billion Windows users using IE6, 7, and 8
> > wasn't enough of a point, I guess.
> 
> MSIE has always supported MTX compresion in EOT; My recollection of
> what happened is that what John said is correct, and that it wasn't
> clear that the OTHER browsers would make use of it even if the patent
> issue was resolved because of the DRM issue that I and others kicked up
> a fuss about. The "EOT Lite" proposal by IIRC Ascender was in response
> to that, but didn't get much traction.

Received on Thursday, 29 March 2012 17:39:38 UTC