[MPEG-OTSPEC] Patent policy and process

[Norbert Lindenberg]

> On Aug 18, 2020, at 04:35, Dave Crossland <dcrossland at google.com> wrote:
> 
> 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. 

Are there actually implementations based on the OFF spec? That might explain why there’s so much broken Arabic and Hindi text out there…

> 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.

That would be fine with me. The key point is that our forum needs to be able to produce documents that are recognized as standards without waiting for the ISO rubber-stamp – same as Unicode and Ecma.

>> 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.

My impression has been that it’s executives who sign, after listening to their lawyers. And there’s precedent for such assignments:
http://blog.unicode.org/2016/05/icu-joins-unicode-consortium.html

> 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. 

Is there precedent for using the Apache license for standards (as opposed to software)?

Norbert