Re: New work on fonts at W3C

Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:
>  Commercial font vendors DO want to be able to license their fonts for
>  the web use. However, allowing raw TrueType and OpenType fonts be
>  used with no protection whatsoever presents too much risk that font
>  vendors and foundries are not willing to take. The problem can easily
>  be solved by deploying a font wrapper like EOT that simply reduces
>  the risk of font piracy.

Based on a comment in the Ascender proposal page:

Zack Weinberg wrote:
>  From Mozilla's point of view, the use of patented technology in EOT
>  is a show-stopper. We cannot make use of any technology which is
>  (known to be) covered by (actively enforced) patents that are not
>  licensed under terms compatible with the GPL. We have expressed this
>  requirement to the EOT patent holders, but they refuse to publish
>  even a proposal for license terms, saying only that /if/ the W3C
>  adopts EOT as a standard, then they will issue a license compatible
>  with the W3C's patent policy. Unfortunately, W3C-policy compliant
>  patent licenses can still be incompatible with the GPL, so that's not
>  good enough for us.

Zack Weinberg wrote:
>  I don't speak for the entire company, nor even the team whose call it
>  would be ultimately, but my understanding is that if the patent
>  issue were resolved we would consider EOT support quite seriously. As
>  long as the patent issue is live, though, we are not interested even
>  in bothering to figure out whether we have any other objections.
>  It's that much of a deal-breaker for us.

According to the Ascender proposal itself, your company owns this patent:

>  The compression uses patented Agfa (now Monotype Imaging) technology.

Do y'all have any intention of addressing this problem?

— Patrick Garies

Received on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 07:37:04 UTC