[MPEG-OTSPEC] Patent policy and process

[Dave Crossland]

Thank you Norbert, I think that's a great summary and I broadly agree.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 3:15 AM Norbert Lindenberg <
mpeg-otspec at lindenbergsoftware.com> wrote:

> I don’t care whether standards produced by the forum eventually become ISO
> standards.


The reason I care is that I believe Vlad 100% even he says this is one of
the major reasons that fonts "just work" **everywhere**:

Beyond the major implementations in professional/consumer operating systems
and applications, there are myriad implementations in "OEM" devices whose
manufacturers would not be comfortable with OpenType®, or even harfbuzz,
without the assurances that ISO OFF provides.

However, your caveat "eventually" is important. It seems that the needs of
the community arise and ought to be met at a higher tempo than the ISO
process, so I expect the mpeg-otspec editor (Vlad) to continue pool updates
and periodically flush them down the ISO process hole, whatever happens to
the development of the documents about what binary file format is commonly
implemented.

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.
>

If the documents are libre licensed, it doesn't really matter who owns the
copyright, because the documents have a shared/split copyright which the
license governs.

Assigning copyrights owned by corporations can be difficult to get
corporate lawyers to sign off on.

So rather I would say that

"Copyright of any standards, or other jointly produced documents, must be
licensed under the "Apache 2.0" license. The forum will likely also publish
documents that are contributed as inputs to the standardization process, or
other documents, are not required to be under a fully libre license, but
must allow commercial redistribution without modification (such as creative
commons 'by-nd')."

I think for this purpose that the Apache license is superior to the MIT/BSD
license or any creative commons licenses because it includes patent
licensing terms.

>
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