From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Aug 25 2005 - 09:32:46 CDT
From: "Peter Constable" <petercon@microsoft.com>:
> Philippe Verdy:
>> Note that a standard does not mean that it will not be proprietary as
>> well
>
> An ISO standard allows for proprietary IP made available under
> reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing terms.
The important key here is "non-discriminatory". This means that the
inclusion of OpenType in MPEG4 must be done so that it can be licenced
legally for use in other systems than Microsoft Windows. It is not just a
question of who can licence it, but how it can be used as well. The
licencing terms should only allow for licencing the standard itself, without
necessarily have to licence other proprietary technologies (for example
importing Windows components, sources or technologies, onto non-Windows
systems).
So it will exclude Uniscribe (due to its intricacy relations with Windows
GDI), but Uniscribe must implement enough interfaces to make fonts
effectively usable with it. This may require adding other data exchanges for
things that are not part of OpenType (such as the layout and reordering
rules), and documenting precisely the role and semantics of the various
OpenType feature tables to effectively support a script. Without them, the
fonts will have extra features needed to support a script correctly, but
unusable by other systems than Windows.
The standard should then be enough open to allow creating and using fonts
for scripts still not supported by the Uniscribe layout engine, and Windows
itself should be able to use those extra, user-provided, scripts described
by OpenType fonts and layout rules. This is the area where international
users are complaining, as they have to wait for Microsoft to have their
script usable in Notepad or any application whose GUI is based on visual
components that are part of the Windows API (notably the Windows controls),
as these applications will have no possibility of supporting these extra
languages without having to rewrite themselves the components.
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