[MPEG-OTSPEC] Patent policy and process

[Norbert Lindenberg]

> On Aug 18, 2020, at 19:59, Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky at monotype.com> wrote:
> 
> I am mostly in agreement, with few comments inline.
>  
>> On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 3:15 AM Norbert Lindenberg wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
>  
> Agree completely that we need to make sure that every voice is heard on equal footing. On a few occasions, I mentioned that this AHG strives to make our decisions based on consensus, which means that anyone who has a valid concern should be able to bring it for consideration of the group, and these concerns have to be resolved to make a progress. At the same time, the mechanism to resolve a blocking objection should also be in place if reaching a consensus decision becomes impossible – I very much like [and for many years have followed] one of the basic HTML design principles: “In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.” I believe we can adopt it pretty much verbatim.

That’s a good principle, but doesn’t actually resolve anything when there’s disagreement between implementors and specifiers (the main people in the room) over what’s best for users and authors (who for the most part are not present).

>> 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.
> 
> While I agree in principle, I am not sure this can be easily implemented in practice. Almost every industry standards organization has significant processes and policies in place, some of them are more rigid than others but none of them (as far as I am aware) have processes in place that would allow such a broad range of output documents be published. We may end up facing a reality that “a forum” will end up collaborating with different organizations to achieve different goals and publish different documents. I do not really see it as a big issue, I think it would be perfectly fine to have a single forum for discussion where input proposals are discussed, and then submitted to different entities (e.g. ISO and Unicode). The mechanisms for such collaborations already exist (official liaisons between different entities), if and when these dependencies need to be formalized.

W3C publishes standards (“recommendations”) and notes by working groups or interest groups.
https://www.w3.org/2019/Process-20190301/#rec-advance
Unicode publishes The Unicode Standard, standard annexes, technical standards, technical reports, and technical notes.
https://www.unicode.org/reports/about-reports.html
https://www.unicode.org/notes/

>> 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.
> 
> Again, this is a decision that may not be in “one size fits all” category – there is always a tradeoff between spec publication steps and implementation / test requirements. I mentioned earlier about WOFF2 development at W3C and the effect W3C implementations & conformance tests requirements had on final Recommendation approval – it took roughly three more years until the WOFF 2.0 Recommendation was officially finalized [to progress from its  Candidate Recommendation stage to Proposed Recommendation presented for Advisory Committee approval].

What caused the three-year delay? And why do you think finalizing the standard without the thing that caused the delay would have been a better outcome?

>> 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.
> 
> Agree in principle, the caveat is in different processes. Some organizations like W3C have all their working documents and most [but not all] of their communications available to general public. Some other organizations (e.g. ISO) prefer to keep their internal working documents accessible only to those who have proper credentials. It doesn’t mean it is impossible to make them publicly available, it means that one need to take an extra step to make it happen. In fact, in most cases when intermediate ISO documents (such as OFF Committee Draft or DIS) would be up for approval via ballot, I often requested to make that document publicly available in order to share it with this group. It’s doable, just doesn’t happen automatically by default.
> And as far as final output documents are concerned, there is another mechanism in place that allows submitting a request to make the ISO standard publicly available, free of charge. The ISO/IEC 14496-22 OFF standard from its 1st edition and up until now (4th edition with amendment #1) has always been publicly available free of charge, but it is also on the official ISO bestsellers list, even though the ISO store page where you can buy the PDF text has a link right next to the “Buy” button that says you can download it for free.

John’s suggestion was that we “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”. So if we agree that publishing all inputs is essential, what are the chances of getting ISO to allow us to do that *by default*?

Best regards,
Norbert
Lindenberg Software LLC