Re: New work on fonts at W3C

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Boris Zbarsky<bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
> That's not what Mozilla has said.

I stand corrected, then.

> IANAL and I don't officially speak for
> Mozilla on this, but I believe what "they" (we?) have said is that for us to
> ship a patented format it must at a minimum be possible for others to then
> redistribute our code without having to renegotiate the patent license.

But not modify it?

>  There may also be something about field-of-use restrictions that I'm not
> qualified to comment on.

I was basing my statement on this post by Robert O'Callahan:

"This is correct. We (Mozilla) could not accept field-of-use restrictions."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2008Nov/0162.html

I understood it (and his explanations in the same thread) to mean that
any patent would have to be licensed under terms allowing free
redistribution *and* modification, including modification of the
relevant code for purposes not related to web browsing (e.g., a
non-networked desktop application to convert font formats).

Which Monotype is apparently willing to do, so I don't think it's an
issue at this point anyway.

> But being "patented" by no means immediately rules
> out anything.  What matters is the patent license, not the fact of being
> patented.

Yes, sorry.  Of course by "patented" I meant "patented and not
licensed under terms compatible with the GPL or similar".

Received on Monday, 22 June 2009 20:59:20 UTC