[MPEG-OTSPEC] MATH Encumbrance

Mon Aug 24 03:12:01 CEST 2020

I had forgotten about rasterization/rendering issues, and recall now that issue for FreeType. High-quality rendering on low-res displays is the only general area I’m aware of in which such issues existed in the past 30 years, but I’ve seen no indication that any of the new spec work people want to collaborate on relate to rendering. In the past 10 years, innovations or areas of interest that have been discussed have be related mainly to color fonts, variations, shaping and layout. And while those are all areas in which patents could have been filed, I’m not aware that any company has taken actions to collect licenses or block other implementations. 20 years ago when SIL developed Graphite, nobody went after them. When Harfbuzz and CoreText started implementing OTL, or when Harfbuzz implemented AAT and Graphite, AFAIK there were no objections. Same with COLR / SVG / CBDT / sbix when implemented by other vendors.

If companies can agree to collaborate on a basis of guaranteeing royalty-free licenses for any essential patents, I certainly won’t have any objection. But I don’t know that it will be necessary to have such guarantees in place in order to have effective collaboration that advances the state of the art in regard to fonts and text for the industry as a whole. As much as we here are enthusiastic about text and fonts, it simply is not what will add the next $20B (<1%) to Apple’s market cap, or Google’s, or MS’s, etc.

So, while in some respects I’m not enthusiastic with ISO processes (though I’ve been involved with them for 20 years), I don’t see their IP-related policies as an obstacle for our area. It certainly hasn’t hindered anything in the past 10 years during which colour fonts and variable fonts became real.

Peter

From: Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2020 5:32 PM
To: Peter Constable <pgcon6 at msn.com>
Cc: John Hudson <john at tiro.ca>; mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at
Subject: Re: [MPEG-OTSPEC] MATH Encumbrance

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 2:11 PM Peter Constable <pgcon6 at msn.com<mailto:pgcon6 at msn.com>> wrote:
It seems to me that there’s a good case study in that TrueType/TTO/OpenType have been with us for about 30 years and that, AFAIK, there have never been any patent suites or demands for licensing royalties throughout that time. (Someone correct me if I’m overlooking something.)

That's not enough. Fedora continued turning off subpixel-rendering and bytecode-interpretter in FreeType as long as the relevant MS patents were not expired.

Peter

From: mpeg-otspec <mpeg-otspec-bounces at lists.aau.at<mailto:mpeg-otspec-bounces at lists.aau.at>> On Behalf Of John Hudson
Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2020 11:16 AM
To: mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at<mailto:mpeg-otspec at lists.aau.at>
Subject: Re: [MPEG-OTSPEC] MATH Encumbrance

Dave wrote, in response to Peter:
I will say that I was a party in some patents in my time at MS that were filed solely for defensive purposes, never with any intent to charge licensing fees.
Right, and my name is on some Google patents for font UI stuff, which I am fine with for the same reasons.

But isn't the point of a formal standards body to get that intent turned into something in writing? And is that what OFF means? Or isn't it?

Indeed, from my perspective, having a clear patent policy is the primary (sole?) virtue of the ISO standardisation of OFF.

The MS math layout patents are yet another case of lack of explicit statement creating potential uncertainty. We can accept the likelihood that the patents were registered for defensive purposes, and that Microsoft would not seek licensing fees or restrict use based on those or other patents related to fonts, but likelihood and goodwill are not certainty.

Dave is right that inclusion in OFF should be a good case study of patents in the format.

JH

--

John Hudson

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