Re: Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting September 10 2002

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

On Sat, 2002-09-14 at 13:34, Richard Stallman wrote: 
[Liam wrote] 
>     Note that fonts are protected IPR, so we can't use pirated ones.
Richard, thank you for your mail.  I actually meant IP there, not IPR, 
sorry for the typo/thinko/whatever ;) 

I did, however, intend the use of the word pirated, because I wanted to 
make the point strongly -- if we don't respect other people's licenses 
and copyrights, even if we happen not to like them, we are not in a good
position to expect others to respect our own.  I'm sure we'd both agree 
on that point. 

I don't think "pirate" need have connotations of ships and swords any 
more than killing a buffer needs to evoke thoughts of murder. When 
words are applied in new contexts, language evolves. 

To be more on-topic :-) a number of individual font designers are 
experimenting with the idea of making more open -- I won't yet say 
Free -- fonts, and using these to attract consulting work.  We need
to be able to reach out and welcome these people.

I spoke with you very briefly at OSCON in San Diego, about maybe making
some kind of font portal or web site, fonts.gnu.org or whatever, to
help provide a focus for this.  I didn't get to ATypI in Rome this
year, and am frantically busy right now, but I think we need some
visibility fairly soon, to change the way people are thinking, to
work on changing the way the computer industry deals with fonts.

Regards,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001