Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Dave Crossland wrote: I heard a rumour that the Reading MATD portfolio site at www.typefacedesign.org has PDFs from which fonts were extracted and posted on some Chinese or Russian forum (communists, eh? ;-) The I can hear you! :) rumour was that the rips were of much lower quality than the student's real, unpublished, OTFs - incomplete metrics, glyph encodings wrong, that kind of thing. Extracting fonts from PDF and saving in editable form is not rocket science. You just grab Fontmatrix/SVN :) Alexandre
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:17 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: Extracting fonts from PDF and saving in editable form is not rocket science. You just grab Fontmatrix/SVN :) That would be a really really really bad feature to put into fontmatrix, I'd say! Let's at least try to keep at least a little good will with the commercial font designer community, if we actually want to see professional font designers start to get involved with open source. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 05:17:57PM +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: rumour was that the rips were of much lower quality than the student's real, unpublished, OTFs - incomplete metrics, glyph encodings wrong, that kind of thing. Extracting fonts from PDF and saving in editable form is not rocket science. You just grab Fontmatrix/SVN :) Or any, years old, FontForge release :) Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
Le Mar 7 avril 2009 16:45, Liam R E Quin a écrit : On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:17 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: Extracting fonts from PDF and saving in editable form is not rocket science. You just grab Fontmatrix/SVN :) That would be a really really really bad feature to put into fontmatrix, I'd say! Let's at least try to keep at least a little good will with the commercial font designer community, if we actually want to see professional font designers start to get involved with open source. IMHO it's not sane to try to mix technical restrictions and licensing restrictions. That's the road to DRM hell. A licensing text should not assume what is technically possible (or not), and tools should not restrict themselves because of common licensing requirements (as long as there is a legal use). -- Nicolas Mailhot
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
2009/4/7 Liam R E Quin l...@holoweb.net: On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:17 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: Extracting fonts from PDF and saving in editable form is not rocket science. You just grab Fontmatrix/SVN :) That would be a really really really bad feature to put into fontmatrix, I'd say! Let's at least try to keep at least a little good will with the commercial font designer community, if we actually want to see professional font designers start to get involved with open source. From what I have seen, type designers are, generally, not actually proprietarily-minded, they just want to do type design and get paid and don't really care about how that happens. Therefore applying free software business models to type design, and showing others how to do it, is how to see professional font designers get involved with open source.
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:37 +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote: On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 10:45:22AM -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote: On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:17 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: Extracting fonts from PDF and saving in editable form is not rocket science. You just grab Fontmatrix/SVN :) That would be a really really really bad feature to put into fontmatrix, I'd say! Let's at least try to keep at least a little good will with the commercial font designer community, if we actually want to see professional font designers start to get involved with open source. This assumes that the mere act of extracting fonts from PDF files is illegal/immoral, which is not true. No, not at all -- it assumes that the type designers and vendors don't like people doing it, which _is_ true, by and large. I'm saying, let's not do things which we know will cause anger, bad publicity and potentially leave a lasting bad taste. Having said that, if a font is marked embeddable, editable and installable, installing it is for sure OK. And no doubt there are plenty of pdf font extraction tools around. Best, Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Liam R E Quin wrote: No, not at all -- it assumes that the type designers and vendors don't like people doing it, which _is_ true, by and large. I'm saying, let's not do things which we know will cause anger, bad publicity and potentially leave a lasting bad taste. Well, I hate to tell you, but apparently Pierre is up to implementing fonts extraction from other file formats like XPS :) He needed it for a project, so he did it. Limiting users just because they might do something bad means not trusting them. Now that's lasting bad taste. Alexandre
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 04:30:12PM -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote: On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:37 +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote: On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 10:45:22AM -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote: On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:17 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: Extracting fonts from PDF and saving in editable form is not rocket science. You just grab Fontmatrix/SVN :) That would be a really really really bad feature to put into fontmatrix, I'd say! Let's at least try to keep at least a little good will with the commercial font designer community, if we actually want to see professional font designers start to get involved with open source. This assumes that the mere act of extracting fonts from PDF files is illegal/immoral, which is not true. No, not at all -- it assumes that the type designers and vendors don't like people doing it, which _is_ true, by and large. I'm saying, let's not do things which we know will cause anger, bad publicity and potentially leave a lasting bad taste. I'd say that, I personally have no interest in what font vendors think, I actually do design or digitize the fonts that I use and I never had to use a propriety font since all such vendors are too lame to produce a font that has good enough quality to satisfy me. However, I neither implemented such feature nor do I advocate its use, however I've many legitimate uses of it that I'm happy with its existence. I'm not advocate illegal extraction/distribution of propriety fonts, I actually find that the best way to fight the immoral, IMO, propriety software is by not using them neither legally nor illegally. I really appreciate the art behind type design, but I highly doubt that type designers in them selves are really interested in locking up their work of art. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [OpenFontLibrary] Bruce Perens criticized SIL Open Font License
On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 00:23 +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote: [...] I really appreciate the art behind type design, but I highly doubt that type designers in them selves are really interested in locking up their work of art. You might be surprised. Having said that, I think I've said enough, it's not worth a flame war :) Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
