Re: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts - new compromise proposal

Thomas Phinney wrote:
> Mikko Rantalainen wrote:
>> You cannot have it both ways: either the same font file can be used
>>  both as a system font and web font or it cannot be used at all (in
>> browser or in the system).
> 
> Nonsense. Unless by "the" system you mean only free OSes.

Yes, I meant free operating systems, such as Linux. The point is, free
operating systems are either going to support compressed fonts
everywhere or they are not supported anywhere.

>> That is, unless you decide that you're not interested in free
>> software (operating systems or browsers) users. In that case, I 
>> wouldn't count on broad implementation.
> 
> Or perhaps the font makers aren't *worried* about free software OSes.
> They just want to be sure that the web fonts won't work natively in
> Mac OS or Windows. It would be *nice* if Linux developers respected
> the web fonts concept as well, and one might hope that the major
> distros would do so, but not a huge deal.

> Remember, none of this is about hard-core DRM, just about
> percentages. Linux users are not exactly a major market for fonts
> today, so if it's possible for them to modify their distro to use web
> fonts natively (or even if it comes that way), that's not something
> most font vendors are going to lose a lot of sleep over.

I find it interesting to think that Linux users do not matter but OS X
does. Searching google for "mac os x OR apple market share" and "linux
market share" seems to hint that market share for Linux seems to be
between 1% to 7% and Mac OS X market share seems to be around between 2%
and 21% (a huge variation indeed). With the success of Asus EEE PC and
other small laptops running Linux, I would expect more and more web
browsers running on Linux in the near future.

If font foundries are happy to make no "protection requirements" for
free operating systems, then perhaps they could rethink their position
about the non-free operating systems, too.

It would be a shame to "force" implementation of some font obfuscation
mechanism on all browser just to later realize that font foundries (the
only ones asking for it) would have been happy with raw fonts, after all.

-- 
Mikko