From: Danny Piccirillo (danny.piccirillo@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Aug 20 2009 - 00:44:10 CDT
I recently went looking for a Unicode Copyleft symbol and was surprised to
find that one did not already exist. Upon Googling the matter, i found
these<http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML022/1223.html>
two <http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML022/0858.html>threads
from 9 years ago. Why is there no Unicode Copyleft symbol? All
arguments against it that may have held anything that long ago no longer do
Thank you,
.danny
> Proponents of the reversed copyright sign need to demonstrate, like
> > everyone else, that the proposed character is in actual use.
> As you might remember, the original intent for the copyleft character
> inquiry comes from the groff (GNU troff) developer team. We are about
> to move all documentation to the GNU Free Documentation License, a
> copyleft license scheme available at
> http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
> During this transition process, we recognized that there is no Unicode
> character for the copyleft symbol. As our aim is (was?) to integrate
> Unicode more deeply into the groff type-setting system, we delayed the
> transition process.
> So the 20+ documents in the groff package are supposed to use the
> copyleft character, many thousands of documents in other GNU software
> packages are on hold or actually do.
> No doubt, you know about the strong market position of free software, so
> you wouldn't want to have the unicode mail-list flooded with thousands
> of mails proving or wanting to use of the character in question, would
> you?
> > If you can find actual software documentation that says, for example,
> > "Copyleft * 2000 by Bernd Warken" (where * substitutes for the
> > copyleft symbol), then that would be more convincing evidence of the
> > need to encode the character.
> There are such documents. The manual pages groff(7), groff_tmac(5), and
> roff(7) were written by me, with the legal ownership donated to the Free
> Software Foundation. We would really like to use the copyleft sign as
> soon as possible - with some U+xxxx code.
> Bernd Warken <bwarken@mayn.de>
>
Aren't private-use characters to be used within relatively small,
> well-contained organizations? ...hence the "private" in "private-use".
> The copyleft idea, and now the copyleft character, will be used by a very
> large number of people, or will at least be viewed by potentially many,
> many people...with some people being part of the same organization, but
> most coming from different ones. This would require different people around
>
> the world to agree upon the code point of the character, which makes it a
> quasi-standard, which seems exactly opposite the purpose of private-use
> characters.
> Just stirring up dust,
> John O'Conner
> Markus Scherer wrote:
> > sounds to me like a private-use character, similar to the apple symbol.
> > markus
>
-- ☮♥Ⓐ - http://www.google.com/profiles/danny.piccirillo
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