[Am-info] Re: True-Type fonts "gone!"

[Eric M. Hopper]

On Wed, 2002-08-21 at 06:51, Marcus de Geus wrote:
> While I'm on the subject, let me dispel a myth. Type 1 fonts are not
> expensive.

I never said they were, and I'm not trying to imply they are.  In fact,
most of your long rant I agree with.

> On the subject of litigation (or at least, threatening suits), if InfiniType
> were still around today, I am pretty certain that they too, like Adobe and
> URW (many of whose products IT licensed, BTW), would be taking action
> against the unauthorized distribution of their products.

If Adobe merely went after people for distributing Type 1 fonts that
Adobe created, that would be one thing.  But they went after people
because they had figured out the Type 1 format and were making fonts of
their own, or were writing Postscript interpreters of their very own
with no Adobe technology aside from the idea of Postscript itself.

> Nevertheless, the right to appropriate copyrighted material (also known as
> stealing someone else's product) applies as little to typefaces as it does
> to music or computer programs. If you want fonts (or music, or computer
> programs) for free, look for freeware. Good typeface designers tend to get
> paid for their skills, so good typefaces tend to cost money.

This is not what I said, and if you'd bothered to read what I said
instead of jumping rabidly to Adobe's defense, you wouldn't have
bothered with any rants about how stupid it is of me to expect
individual fonts to be free as in beer.

Adobe went after people who even thought 'Type 1' or 'Postscript' in
their sleep.  They nearly managed to completely kill both technologies
by being extremely paranoid about anybody else playing.  Microsoft
managed to exploit Adobe's own stupidity to get TrueType pushed through
as a standard.  I remember Apple even helping them at the time.

I'm sorry, I don't want to live in a world in which Adobe owns
everything.  I don't want to live in a world in which Microsoft owns
everything either.  When a company plays the game like Adobe did at the
time, they play right into Microsoft's hands.  That's Microsoft's turf,
and if you play that way, Microsoft will win.

Adobe truly deserved to have Type 1 and Postscript nearly die as
standards.  They certainly didn't act like they wanted anybody else to
use them.  If they hadn't acted the way they did, Microsoft wouldn't
have had the leverage they needed to push through TrueType, and we'd all
be using nice, technologically superior Type 1 fonts today.

There's a reason Microsoft is petrified of Linux.  It's because in the
Linux world, nobody is stupid in the way Adobe was.  Microsoft no longer
has any way of gaining ownership of the technology used in a certain
area.

Have fun (if at all possible),
-- 
The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they
be properly armed.  -- Alexander Hamilton
-- Eric Hopper (hopper@omnifarious.org 
http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper) --