Hi Mike! On Apr 7, 10:28 pm, "Mike Shaver" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Dave <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > If by "I would pay to have this implemented" you > mean "I would provide indemnification", then that could be more > interesting, but not really a topic for this forum.
If I was unclear, no, I am not offering money for indemnification, I am simply offering money to hire a developer to write patches for 70132 and friends. > I don't believe that patent issues are the only barrier to > interoperable implementation, but I'm not quite as confident as you > seem to be that there are no such issues possible. Please explain the issues you have in mind :-) > A public and > comprehensive test suite would be a big step forward, though it's > possible that WebKit has one as part of their implementation. Then > we'd be able to tell better exactly what an implementation is required > to do to interoperate, and we'd likely have a better sense of what > claims would be "essential" for purposes of implementing something > interoperable -- which something might be a significant superset of > what's actually specified in CSS2. This is useful technical information for me, thank you. I'm not a software developer so I can't speak to the test case availability in WebKit. I'll ask, though. (The following to the end is perhaps off-topic, and though I'm interested in this discussion, other readers may not be :-) > > IANAL: A patent suit seems unclear because of the W3C's patent policy. > > What patent policy was in place when @font-face was specified in 1998? None, as far as I can tell from following http://www.w3.org/TR/patent-policy/ 's previous versions links to: "This proposal has been under development since October 1999" - http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-patent-policy-20010816/ > How would it affect patents that were filed or acquired in the > interim, given that @font-face was dropped in CSS 2.1 and hasn't seen > CR since? The patent policy applies "as a condition of participating in a Working Group" - the members of the CSS WG are listed at http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/members.php3 - Adobe and Microsoft are members - and "any [patents] related to the work of that particular Working Group [are made royalty-free ...] for the life of the patents in question ... regardless of changes in participation status or W3C Membership." (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#sec- W3C-RF-license) So patent grants are made when a patent holder starts participating in a W3C Working Group, and therefore any patents over @font-face were granted retroactively when Adobe and Microsoft joined, and do not expire if they leave the WG or W3C. However, that @font-face is dropped from CSS21 is important, because Section 5.10 of the current patent policy says "If the Recommendation is rescinded by W3C, then no new licenses need be granted but any licenses granted before the Recommendation was rescinded shall remain in effect." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Aug/0368.html confirms that CSS2 will be rescinded by W3C when CSS21 becomes a full Recommendation. Imagining that Mozilla is really facing a serious patent threat here, it seems even more important to implement the feature while all the applicable patent licenses will be granted in perpetuity :-) Cheers, Dave _______________________________________________ dev-tech-layout mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-layout
