[MPEG-OTSPEC] Defining the text shaping working group’s scope

Tue Aug 18 22:08:08 CEST 2020

This is what I'm talking about:
https://github.com/googlefonts/colr-gradients-spec/issues/31#issuecomment-675686317

behdad
http://behdad.org/

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 11:50 AM Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 12:27 PM Levantovsky, Vladimir <
> Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Behdad,
>>
>>
>>
>> I am sorry you feel that your voice has not been heard, I happen to think
>> this is not the case and that your voice is heard loud and clear.
>>
>
> Vlad,
>
> I asked you to tell me how I can make a formal complaint to ISO. You asked
> that we videocall. During the video call your only goal was to talk me out
> of wanting to file a formal complaint. Your argument was that it will
> disturb the adhoc situ. In reality I see now, you are only concerned with
> maintaining your own position. At any rate, I agreed to let you talk to
> Peter & MS to see if they are willing to accept fault, apologize, and
> commit to a fair process. You said you'll go talk to them, and you made
> sure to repeat three times that it will take time. Now I see you wanted to
> just shut me down for longer.
>
> You told me that you had a long conversation with Peter after his
> smoking-gun message (
> https://gist.github.com/behdad/d08f958f8a5e2cb6badf6e32598427df). Now I
> see you basically agreed together to maintain your power positions each and
> not attack each other to keep the status quo going. Neither Peter nor MS
> every apologized for that illegitimate assertion of power and dominance
> over other parties in this space.
>
> Anyway, while having this conversation with me, on this group, you go
> ahead and **praise** the "adhoc" process as a success story. The same
> adhoc that **enabled** all the abuses I'm alleging to. There's a reason
> standards have formal procedures, such that a minority cannot force their
> opinion into the standard. The "adhoc" broke that and indeed a minority
> hijacked the process. And you are complicit in this.
>
> I lost a lot of respect for you.
>
> I'm done with you and Peter and this list. What a farce.
>
> I will be contacting the Canadian standardization body to exercise my
> rights to influence OFF. I encourage others to do the same.
>
> behdad
>
>
>
>
>> You made your allegations in various public forums and directly in this
>> group (https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/2020-August/001903.html
>> and https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/2020-August/001925.html),
>> and I am not sure if there is anything else that has to be done to
>> acknowledge them.
>>
>>
>>
>> To give this discussion a bit more of historical footing, in many of your
>> posts you are referring to discussions that initially happened privately
>> within a limited group of participants, who set the ambitious goal to give
>> the second chance in life to variable fonts technology and unify prior
>> approaches (variation fonts from Apple and multiple masters from Adobe) as
>> part of the new, now widely supported version of OpenType / OFF. Since I
>> wasn’t a participant of those initial private discussions, I cannot comment
>> on them, neither on their substance nor on their format. What I do know is
>> that once the initial agreements on tentatively proposed technical
>> solutions were reached, the results of the discussion had been made
>> available publicly, first for a technical review of much larger pool of
>> participants (with many members of this group and myself included), then as
>> a public presentation at the ATypI 2016 conference (
>> https://www.atypi.org/conferences/atypi-warsaw-2016/programme/activity?a=619),
>> and then presented to this group and to ISO WG as a collection of input
>> contributions from their respective members (
>> https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/2016-October/000827.html).
>>
>>
>>
>> My perspective on all this is that enabling new technical developments
>> within the large installed base of the existing implementations on multiple
>> different platforms is a significant effort, one that is never easy, and it
>> likely required taking into consideration many factors including both new
>> technical design considerations and shortcomings of the existing legacy
>> implementations. The fact that you were among very few other people who
>> could pull it off is in itself an achievement that deserves accolades and
>> high commendations.
>>
>>
>>
>> We cannot change what happened in the past, but we can learn from it and
>> adjust our behaviors to make things better in the future. If you feel that
>> your ideas back then had not received a sufficient level of consideration,
>> we can always revisit them. Technical developments never stop, improvements
>> are being made constantly, and this groups’ work is no exception. We strive
>> to make our decisions and recommendations by consensus if at all possible,
>> and as part of this process we try to accommodate different concerns from a
>> purely pragmatic point of view – working implementations deployed on
>> multiple platforms [that may be less than perfect] would likely be seen as
>> advantageous to technically pure solutions that may not get wide support.
>>
>>
>>
>> Open discussions in a public forum is what gives us needed assurances
>> that all ideas and proposals are heard and treated equally on their value.
>> My goal is to protect and preserve this public forum for us to be able to
>> continue our work. Making accusations and assigning blame for something
>> that happened in the past, in a different setting and outside of this
>> particular forum isn’t constructive, unless we can learn from it, improve
>> how we do things, and move on with the commitment to better our approaches
>> and practices. This is clearly something we can all benefit from, in my
>> opinion.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> Vlad
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org>
>> *Sent:* Monday, August 17, 2020 3:58 AM
>> *To:* Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com>
>> *Cc:* John Hudson <john at tiro.ca>; mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at
>> *Subject:* Re: [MPEG-OTSPEC] Defining the text shaping working group’s
>> scope
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 8:28 PM Levantovsky, Vladimir <
>> Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com> wrote:
>>
>> *On* Saturday, August 15, 2020 11:55 AM John Hudson wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 15082020 8:12 am, 梁海 Liang Hai wrote:
>> > Part of the reason why I’m not keen on organizing this collective
>> effort under ISO’s management (be it a WG, Ad Hoc Group, or what), is that
>> ISO and/or JTC1’s publication process is not suitable for the documents
>> we’re thinking. All we need is an easy to navigate modern website with all
>> the vital information we want to maintain, but I doubt ISO/IEC ITTF will
>> grant us that. To be honest, it’s a pain to read those procedural documents
>> in JTC1’s official format—it’s just gonna discourage potential participants
>> for no good reason.
>>
>> Agreed.
>>
>> Vlad does a great job of managing the institutional requirements — not
>> only for OFF and ISO but also for webfonts and W3C — but I'm not keen on
>> a process that effectively makes one person the interface between
>> collective effort and institutional approval.
>>
>> Thank you John for your acknowledgement of my efforts. I would like to
>> clarify certain things because I feel there is a possibility for confusion
>> here as you mentioned two related but vastly different activities [that
>> ironically share similar names – OFF and WOFF], where the roles I play are
>> very different.
>>
>>
>>
>> ...
>>
>>
>>
>> From ISO WG point of view, this started as an experiment and a favor to
>> the community, and, after many years of successful development, we are now
>> seen as pioneers of sorts, a group that did things differently and
>> proved that we can be very successful and achieve great results with the
>> bulk of the work done offline
>> <https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/d7T0CZ6oyzh5vrVnuzi9YX>. We also
>> earned trust that our proposals and recommendations are consistently of
>> high quality, and the successful industry-wide adoption of ISO OFF /
>> OpenType standard speaks volumes – one of my goals is to preserve this
>> trust and relationships with ISO WG for the benefit of this community!
>>
>>
>>
>> https://twitter.com/behdadesfahbod/status/1295225739126571008
>> <https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/Sca0C1wnqGSMg2DwFG97Uy>
>>
>
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