[MPEG-OTSPEC] Patent policy and process

[Norbert Lindenberg]

Let me try and take a stab. I’ll use “I” because I don’t want to presume that everybody or anybody agrees, but I acknowledge that much of this has benefited from previous discussions on this list or from earlier conversations.

I’d like to have a forum where font rendering implementors, font developers, font tool developers, text application developers, script experts, and others with relevant expertise can collaborate on roughly equal footing. It’s unavoidable that implementors in the end have a stronger voice because without them it’s all just talk, but I think it’s essential to get out of this situation where a single company or person can control the process.

I’d like to have a forum that produces a range of documents, some very formal, such as a standard on OpenType text shaping (as being defined in the scope discussion), some less formal, such as orthography documentation or guides on developing fonts for specific scripts. There need to be different processes for different kinds of documents.

Standards produced by the group should have a specification, a conformance test suite, and at least two conformant implementations. There should be defined stages from idea to standard, as used by the W3C or Ecma TC39.

The outputs of this forum, and all inputs used in decisions, should be available to anyone with an internet connection, free of charge, in HTML or PDF format. I know that people commonly rely on second-hand information about ISO standards because they don’t want to pay €€€ for a PDF document. I also find it ridiculous that this AHG is supposed to work on a mandate whose input most of us don’t have access to.

I don’t care whether standards produced by the forum eventually become ISO standards. I know that parts of the Unicode Standard are published as ISO 10646, but in my work in software internationalization, that’s never been relevant to my work – all I need is on the Unicode web site. Similarly I know that ECMA-262, the standard for JavaScript, is re-published as ISO 16262, but I never even looked at it while working in TC39. HTML and CSS seem to be doing quite well without ISO standards.

I understand that the forum needs an IP policy and other rules to keep the lawyers of the participating companies happy. Copyright of any standards, or other jointly produced documents, must be owned by the forum. The forum will likely also publish documents that are contributed as inputs to the standardization process, or other documents, whose copyright may be retained by their contributors.

Best regards,
Norbert
Lindenberg Software LLC



> On Aug 17, 2020, at 09:37, John Hudson <john at tiro.ca> wrote:
> 
> On 15082020 10:28 am, Dave Crossland wrote:
>> On Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 11:55 AM John Hudson <john at tiro.ca> wrote:
>> what we mostly want 
>> institutions to do is get out of the way.
>> 
>> Yet, the rubber stamping and "setting in stone" with a us patent policy is necessary (but not wholly sufficient) for implementation and adoption:
>> 
>> A cycle from de facto, to de jure, to de facto.
>> 
>> That's the essential problem with commontype.org and GitHub.com/Opentype and all the others right now, it's all too de facto with no clear route to de jure. 
> 
> 
> I agree that having clarity over IP and a patent policy in place is important*, and that this is one of the attractions to collaborating under the auspices of an existing organisation that has such a policy and to which a number of participating companies and individuals may already be signed up.
> 
> That said, a patent policy is one of the easier things to write and agree on, and I think for companies currently considering whether and how to engage in what we’re scoping, the IP considerations will be the same regardless of the organisation.
> 
> So from that perspective, I think it makes most sense for us—as we scope the work—to also consider to what kind of process do we want, collectively and voluntarily, to submit ourselves. How do we want to collaborate? And then we look at existing organisations and determine which, if any, provide that kind of process (and will they have us?).
> 
> JH
> 
> 
> 
> * Was surprised to note that UFO doesn’t appear to have a patent policy.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> John Hudson
> Tiro Typeworks Ltd    
> www.tiro.com
> 
> Salish Sea, BC        
> tiro at tiro.com
> 
> 
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