On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 04, 2003, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "failure notice (fwd)":
> > 1. I assume that Culmus or some other group will eventually produce
> > quality TrueType and OpenType TrueType fonts with support for diacritics
> >...
> > with diacritics. Masterfont gave us a timetable for adding these features,
> > something that the Culmus authors would not commit to.
>
> This boils to one thing: we/you (the Israeli free software community, Sun,
> TkOS or whatever) want something from the Culmus author but instead of
> offering to do the work ourselves we "complain" about the author not
> comitting on doing this quickly.
Actually, the problem was simply schedule. We needed a
schedule committment, Sun had the budget, MasterFont agreed to do the work
and that was it. I wouldnt try to read into this anything negative.
> Unfortunately, I'm getting similar complaints about Hspell, from people
> who think that supporting their favorite software is "very important and
> very urgent" but not willing to lift a finger to do this work. Counter-
> intuitively, the complaint-stream seems to become stronger the better Hspell
> becomes.
> It seems that we, as a community, have not yet internalized the concept
> of free software.
>
> > 3. There might be some legal exposure to Sun in distributing the Culmus
> > fonts. The fact that the authors claim the provenance is beyond dispute
> > (and they in fact have done excellent work on the subject of the
> > provenance), and the fact that RedHat distributes the fonts does not mean
> > that Elser+Flake, MasterFont, Shmuel Guttman or even Microsoft
> > (through SCO of course) cannot file a tort (and a newspaper article)
> > claiming otherwise. Sun does not need this.
>
> This is a problematic attitude. Because it basically means you cannot use
> any free software at all in OpenOffice! All free software might be marred
> by patent violations, stolen code (ask SCO :)), and who knows what else.
You are generalizing here from a specific issue. I received indications
from a font vendor that one or more of the Culmus fonts violates their
design rights under Eglish, German and possibly Israeli law. This is not
Open Source software in general, we are talking about a specific work and
a specific company. We did not receive such indications about any other
OpenOffice software components. Rather than risk the negative implications
of a test in court we decided to shift the legal responsibility to a third
party, namely MasterFont.
> But there's an alternative: instead of bundling OpenOffice with stuff like
> Hebrew fonts, a Hebrew spell-checker, and who knows what else, you can
> simply require the user to install those seperately. This way you're simply
> shifting the legal burden to distributions like Redhat et al. But even
> if you don't include stuff like Culmus or Hspell with OpenOffice, it would
> be nice for OpenOffice to support those things out-of-the-box for users
> that have them already installed.
OpenOffice will support all of these wonderfull things out-of-the-box in
the fullnbess of time. Without out-of-the-box support the product is a
non-starter for everyone except geeks like us.
> > 5. The price of these fonts was very high. The price for making these
> > fonts completely free was beyond the budget of Sun and the MoF for this
> > project.
>
> The price is obviously open to negotiation. One day "generic" font makers
> will not be able to charge these very high prices, because a free alternative
> will be available. Culmus is a very big step in this direction, and there
> are also plenty of speciality fonts freely available for Hebrew now (I showed
> a few links on ivrix-discuss a few months ago). The font companies will
> one day wake up and figure out that they cannot make revenue forever on
> something that took them 3 person-months to create, 20 years ago.
This might be true in three to five years from now, insha'llah, but it is
not true today. Especially the part about bitmaps in the fonts.
> > Frankly, I'm a bit suprised that big companies like Sun don't already own
> all the fonts they use. After all, when I write code for the company I work
> for, they get the full ownership of the code, they don't just "rent" it from
> me. So why didn't they insist (in the past, not just today regarding OO)
> on full ownership of fonts that were developed for them?
Sun owns many Hebrew fonts, but remember that the fonts required by OOo
aren't plain fonts. They are OpenType fonts with TrueType outlines,
custom bitmaps for 8 to 16 points, presentation forms and GPOS and GSUB
data for tuning the positioning of the diacritics. AFAIK there exist no
such fonts today and the first such fonts to reach the market will be from
MasterFont.
The fonts are licensed from MasterFont and not purchased outright because
the price for outright purchase (whish was a fair price, BTW) is far in
excess of the budget provided by the sponsors of the OOo project.
- yba
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