Michael Kaplan wrote:
> We rob NO ONE. We behave with honor and we wish others to do the same with
> us.
> Its a respect thing.
For sure. But you understand that this is politics as well. Many aspects of
copyright and intellectual property, and even the very concept of private
property, are still the subjects of political debate.
In order for your noble statement to be totally effective, there must be no
rich men or poor men to play Robin Hood with. But solving such economic
dilemmas, as Sarasvati might remind us, is not the task for the public
mailing list of a character encoding standard.
Real-life down-to-hearth issues pop up every day on the Unicode List
(probably because this is the roll-out phase of the standard). We recently
discovered how IT people in India have to work sharing rented modem on old
and slow telephone lines. It is not the task of Unicode to fix the telecomm
infrastructure of India. Not to mention the problem of uneven distribution
of resources in the world.
So, in that occasion, this forum concentrated itself on answering a single
pertaining question: is the size overhead of UTF-8 compatible with the
situation of Internet in India? Luckily, the answer was yes: however slow is
your Internet connection, the fact that UTF-8 uses 3 bytes for each Indic
character won't make things worse, because plain text is an insignificant
part of the overall size of an Internet document.
About the issue that you raised regarding "software piracy", you should
consider that in many countries it is easy to step into huge multi-floor
shops which sell "illegal" copies of software and manuals.
Feel free to disagree with this state of things, but please avoid publicly
calling "pirates" people who just did what it is customary to do in most
parts of the world. Or, probably, who just did a quick test. This is not
fair, not appropriate, and not a technical approach to problems.
By the way, I would not be so sure that at Microsoft Corp. they need your
help to do their math. It is not the task of this forum to decide whether,
for a major corporation, it is more important to be strict about copyright,
rather than to be the first and best behavers on one of the most promising
markets on the planet.
It is OK to point out that such-and-such font is not supposed to be free (or
that it is, but only provided you install the latest version of
such-and-such operating system), or to inform that there also are free or
shareware fonts out there that cover such-and-such Indic scripts.
But I feel that this is not the proper place to settle legal issues about
software distribution. JMHO.
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jan 25 2002 - 04:33:22 EST