RE: New work on fonts at W3C

Brad,

 

I believe that free and open market is the only realistic force that
would provide an incentive for font vendors to "act reasonably" and do
something *you* believe is in their own interest. Just an analogy -
nobody could force Comcast (a cable company in US) to drop the price for
their service when it was the monopolistic broadband service provider,
but things changed very quickly when Verizon (a telephone company in US)
introduced its fiber-optic service to residential customers. Now the
consumers do have a choice and it's the only force that makes Comcast
and Verizon act reasonably. Open standard can only enable this to happen
- if we choose to act wisely the results will truly benefit everybody on
the web. By enabling commercial font vendors offer their products to web
designers we put them in a position where they will compete with each
other - this competition (and nothing else) will force them (i.e. us)
"act reasonably" and in the best interests of our customers (i.e. you).

 

For this to happen, Monotype has agreed to provide the best font
compression technology available to date, free of charge and with no
restrictions. I just do not see how this could possibly compromise the
standard.

 

Regards,

Vladimir

 

 

From: Brad Kemper [mailto:brad.kemper@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 1:05 PM
To: Levantovsky, Vladimir
Cc: Dave Crossland; Chris Wilson; John Daggett; www-style@w3.org; Tab
Atkins Jr.
Subject: Re: New work on fonts at W3C

 

 

On Jun 22, 2009, at 9:35 AM, Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:





The greatest value of open standards is to create an environment where
as many participants can happily enjoy the freedom of choice - and this
includes the freedom to choose anything they need and want. Freedom is
not a synonym to "free of charge", and, when it comes to fonts, open
standard that restricts its users to a severely limited set of font
choices that are only available for free limits the freedom of both
consumers and font vendors. 

 

I would like to see commercial font publishers to join the party by
providing reasonable web font licensing in a way that did not require
new formats (that they then use to get more money out of people that
already bought their fonts once for creative production of published
content), and did not require new standards-body-sanctioned DRM, and did
not prevent licensing under GPL. 

 

Unfortunately though, we cannot force major foundries to act reasonably,
even in their own business interest, and they have a history of an
ultra-conservative approach to new business opportunities. There seems
to be a strong feeling on this list that we should not, however,
compromise the standard in order to accommodate the reluctance of said
foundries. And for implementors that publish under a GPL license, OET
seems to be a non-starter.