[ I am not subscribed to hebrew list, so I do not post there; feel free to relay if it is worth the value. I will not subscribe to this list just to post it, and since Elaine did not explain on which list she want the discussion to take place, I choose the list I am subscribed to. ]
On Thursday, December 23th, 2004 22:38Z E. Keown va escriure: > > He thought that it is illegal under certain > circumstances to sell non-ISO 10646-compliant software > in the EU. Hmmm, that would mean that GSM SMS encoding (I believe it is called ERMES), which blatantly violates ISO/IEC 10646 frame (the same codepoint may encode both a Greek and a Latin character, based on uppercase lookalike), will become illegal... If it turns to be true, it will be hot news to everybody including her brother, at least here in Europa! Also, conformance to 10646 (very different from compliance to Unicode) requires the mention of the UTF, the implementation level and the collections used. So it would mean that ANY software (that deals with strings, and to which the "certain circumstances" might apply) selled here should make these parameters clear. Well, looks like about nobody is complying the law :-). Or else, that the "certain circumstances" are rather narrow. > That is, if I develop Hebrew/Castilian software which > uses custom combining classes or other deviations from > Unicode Hebrew, this software cannot be sold in Spain > (in EU since 1986). If you are developping this kind of software, here in Spain it will undoubtly be considered as scholarship work (because of the Ladino etc. heritage). And I doubt you can invoke a general-public regulation to apply to this kind of work: first politicians are not that dumb, second almost everybody will understand it is benefical to Spain to allow this kind of software to enter, even if it means looking at another direction, and third anyway scholars will not attend such limitations: if they need the software, they will use/buy it. So, do not worry, you can continue to develop your software, and taylor it to the Spanish "market", even it does not comply with any and all of the requisites of ISO/IEC 10646 (even if I miss the deviations that may qualify as non-conformance, particularly since "The rules for forming the combined graphic symbol are beyond the scope of ISO/IEC 10646."; just specify you are using implementation level 3.) ( Of course, another thing could be that your software might directly compete with one done here, and that the local software company may invoke such a regulation to try to keep you out of their home market; just like you can try similar tricks in Canada. But then we are speaking about disguised tool barriers, which is a much more wide subject. And can apply to anywhere in the world. And there are laws here in the EU to beat these kind of barrers. ) Antoine