Re: New work on fonts at W3C

> 1) Mozilla attempted to block the discussion of the technical merits of
> the proposed technology bringing patent licensing issues as an argument.
> You made a big deal out of "field of use restriction" painting it as a
> severe blocking issue and a "show-stopper", although Mozilla is known to
> support and implement other technologies (such as CSS,
> http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Disclosures) where there are known patents
> licensed with the field of use restriction.

I think we always been pretty consistent in saying that we weren't
terribly excited about MTX and the idea of domain-specific compression,
going back to our discussions during the October meeting:

  http://www.w3.org/Fonts/Misc/minutes-2008-10

Legal concerns were brought up before but that was just one of the
concerns raised.

> 2) When the patent licensing issues have been resolved to the mutual
> satisfaction of all interested parties involved and to the best
> interests of the open source community - Mozilla makes an attempt to
> reject the technology in question based on the technical merits that
> have never been discussed in the first place! I would like to remind you
> that it was Mozilla (and not Microsoft) who repeatedly blocked the
> attempts to form a working group at W3C where technical merits of the
> future web font solution could have been discussed.

We simply were not in favor of a group intended to define EOT as the web
font format, along with others.  I think we've been fairly proactive in
discussing what we would support, as you know.

John

Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 15:26:25 UTC