"Why is it that so many small or independent developers give us so much quality software, often without reward, and huge companies like AOL can only spit out this bloated garbage?"
Because small developers (even freeware/open source) have to compete for mindshare to survive. An established giant like AOL or Microsoft with a captive audience does not. They stagnate, and begin to focus on extracting more money from said captive audience than gaining a larger, more loyal, or happier audience.
The little guy's product has to be better to be successful; the big guy's product just has to be branded.
The smartest companies (Apple, Google, et al.) learn how to do both.
Is the code open so I can update the GNU utilities? (Despite Apple's "commitment" to Open Source, I highly doubt it. But maybe they'll surprise me.)
As part of Darwin 8.0, I would expect the code for cp and mv to be licenced under the APSL, which, dispite being Free, is incompatable with the GPL. So, the code is available, but it can't be added to GNU tools, due to restrictions in the GPL.
However, rsync is GPLed (and they're shipping a modified rsync), so the code necessary to do what you want will be available under the GPL anyway. (In fact, it's been available in RsyncX for a while.)
I don't see why you would doubt Apple abiding by the licenses of the code they use. As far as I know, they've never been accused of not doing so.
Hold on a second, you're telling me MSN has an integrated tool which indexes and searches my entire desktop, including e-mail and file contents?
The product which you are describing was purely a reactionary move. Spotlight was announced and distributed in June, Microsoft bought the company on which the MSN desktop search is based in July. I sincerely doubt they were working on a pre-WinFS product before Apple demonstrated Spotlight.
Saying either "copied" the other is wrong, but certainly Microsoft is just throwing money against everything Apple (et al) does. This is a stupid way of operating, and as a consumer and a developer, I find that Microsoft's products suffer from it.
I'm sure if you look deeper you'll notice other things like core video behaving very much like Microsoft's GDI+, albeit a bit more advanced since it's a lot newer.
Bullshit. Pure bullshit. You know nothing of either of these technologies. Your other claims are at least arguable, but this is not. It would even be fair to say that Avalon (in Longhorn) is more advanced than Apple's display tech, but comparing GDI+ to Quartz+CoreImage is a joke.
Because, as we know "It Just Works" was invented by Apple.
Uh, actually, IIRC, it was a significant part of their ad copy at one point. The reason Umbuntu, etc. use it is because it's so closely associated with Apple-quality products. It may not be a trademark, but it is definitely associated with Apple. Perhaps you didn't know this.
Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage.
Which is why you don't have to for the system to work. Yes, the more metadata that's available, the better, but it doesn't suddenly break down (as you seem to be saying) if you're inconsistent. If you organize at all, it works better. If you don't, it still works better than it used to.
Also, invoking "Metacrap" is basically meaningless, as the entire piece is about the use of metadata on the Internet, which is a vastly different scenario than on the desktop. I don't see how any of the seven points really applies.
On the internet, the producer of the metadata and the consumer are not the same, and have very different desires. On the desktop, you are the consumer of your own metadata. You have much more incentive to do it well, and much less incentive to do it poorly (lie). If you add keywords like "v1agra pr0n britney spears" to your documents , it's nobody's problem but your own.
If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless
This might be true if the system *only* used metadata, but it doesn't. Plain text files don't have any kind of user-added metadata at all, but you can still find them by content, or filename, or create/modify dates, etc.
If i was confronted by Java Source Code for a program, I wouldn't be able to read it and I would not know what to describe it as.
This is a horrible example for some point I cannot fathom. Why on earth would you *need* to describe something that you can't read? Why would you even care if the file is effectively meaningless to you? Why would you need to describe a source file at all, when all of the useful information would be part of the content index?
Maybe you should learn more about a subject before likening it to Communism.
Apple has done great, but they have clearly ignored their own UI rules for the sake of eye candy at times.
HIG stands for Human Interface Guidelines. If they were "rules" they would be stupid, because there are no absolute rules to design, and pretending there are leads to bad designs. Without such guidelines, you'd end up with even worse designs. Look at Open Source GUIs (if you must).
Really, the HIG should be titled "Interface Design for People That Can't be Trusted to Design Decent Interfaces without Handholding: THIS MEANS YOU!!!"
Mail, in OS X, is even a third window gui(?), it isn't quite Aqua, and has noticable differences unlike any other application on OS X.
The toolbar pinstripes have been replaced by a gradient, and they stopped using a drawer. That is all. It is not the end of the world. It can even be turned off as easily as the metal.
My question is: Where did they get a "telepathy-proof room"?
Quoth the original paper:
Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.
If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. The situation could be regarded as analogous to that which would occur if the interrogator were talking to himself and one of the competitors was listening with his ear to the wall. To put the competitors into a "telepathy-proof room" would satisfy all requirements.
Now, if you think it's safe for the critical scientific eye to discard this part of the test, why be so literal with the remainder? It's not clear (to me anyway) whether Turing addressed this because he actually believed in it, whether it was just the belief of the day, or whether he simply wished to cover all possibilities, meaning for it to be taken as a thought experiment more than a scienfic procedure; perhaps it was all of these.
My point is that using the original paper's description of the test (Turing's test) is just throwing out 55 years of research and debate over what intellegence is, and how to identify it.
It's a brilliant paper, certainly, but it is not the final word on anything. Treating it like it is is a great way to get ALICE in the news, but it's a great step backwards when trying to come up with a real measure of machine intellegence (a Turing test).
And I don't see how this is remotely new. Apple has had Sherlock since OS 8, and Find File since well before that. Microsoft has had the Find command on the Start menu since Windows 95. Where's the beef?
The key difference is that modern search features are actually useful. Remember why Google got so popular? Not because search engines were new, but because Google actually found what you were looking for.
Plenty of people can say "I never use Find" -- but that has much more to do with the fact that Find functions have mostly sucked than with people not wanting to find files.
What I've realized in the past 24 hours is that this panic is caused by the same flawed understanding of type that caused Congress to explicity deny typefaces copyright protection.
The theory was that if typefaces were copyrightable, then the type designer could wield those rights over any user of the face. Somehow this was construed to mean that a newspaper could be forced to censor itself if the type's creator didn't like what they printed with his typeface. So instead of clarifying the law to excempt such theoretical (but not realistic) possibilities, they excluded typefaces from copyright alltogether.
So instead, they are treated more like real property, dispite resembling in every way intellectual property. Whereas you can own a book without owning the story it contains, owning a font is like owning a hammer.
In practice, companies that sell fonts require license agreements that prohibit you from copying them and so forth. However, this is not the same as copyright. It's an agreement between two parties, not a right afforded to you by the government.
So, the hammer salesman requires you to agree not to share your hammer before he'll sell it to you.
The words can still be used without the font, and the meaning, value, or level of protection needed do not change as a result of removing the font (other than how the document looks), how can the GPL "infect" the content of the document?
It doesn't infect the content in that way. Once you remove the font, you can do anything you want with your copyrighted text. However, if you had released it previously under the GPL, then that version continues to be GPLed.
I'll say again the only really conclusive point in this whole story: the GPL is not suitable for fonts.
Fonts can't be copyrighted (at least, they can't in the US). Seems like the same argument could be made against Copyleft:
Indeed, but it's weirder than that.
The confusion basically stems from the fact that the law takes something that in all ways resembles intellectual property, and instead treats it like physical property. Imagine if a written story were treated as entirely dependent on the page it was printed on. If you photocopied the page, the author would have no rights over your copy at all. (This is why copyright exists in the first place!)
Basically, while you can't copyright a typeface, it is still your property, and you still can dictate terms to the people you sell it to.
I can sell you a car on the condition that you not sell it to anyone else. If you do, I can sue you for breaking our contract. However, I can't sue the person you sold it to if he sells it, because the car is no longer mine. I have no rights over the car once it leaves my ownership.
This works in the physical world because you can't simply "copy and paste" a car to have 2 cars.
The (flawed) idea behind the US interpretation is that if type could be copyrighted, then type makers could wield those rights over users of that type. If you designed the type that a book used, and didn't like what the book was about, you could demand that they stop using your type. (It is exactly the same fear being instilled in this article.)
This make logical sense in a vacuum (like Congress), but is completely at odds with the way type has always worked before, and continues to work in other countries. It's purely a hypothetical situation, and one that could be prevented by some means other than completely excluding typefaces from copyright protections.
It's also worth noting that the non-copyrightability of type in the US is widely opposed. It isn't the first time the US has been stupid about IP rights.
If fonts are not intellectual property, though, then how can a font be GPL'ed? Or, for that matter, how can commercial font makers prevent others from distributing their fonts for free (possibly with a new name)?
When you buy a typeface, say from Adobe, there are terms and conditions to the purchase that you have to agree to. These include not copying them, etc. It's a contractual agreement, not copyright. As I said before, they can be considered property, but not intellectual property. With IP, your right to license it stems from your holding the copyright. With real property, your right to license it stems from your posession of it.
Basically, they don't hand it over unless you agree not to share it. They can't, apparently, go after people that acquired them "in the wild", which is why you don't have the "TIAA" busting down doors to go after "type pirates".
(Again, I'm not 100% certain about much of this. Most of my awareness of the subject comes from osmosis.)
Are you sure that fonts are code? I would have thought that the font rendering engine is the code and the representation of each character within the font is data.
The confusion stems from the fact that fonts contain both outline shapes and glyph instructions that programmatically modify those shapes. The shapes could easily be argued are just data, but the instructions operate like any other interpreted language. (OpenType/TrueType might even be Turing-complete. I know for sure that PostScript and TeX are.)
I can also see rejecting the idea of a document being code -- but say you've got an HTML document with PHP embedded in it, to be interpreted. Nobody is arguing that the output, the interpreted and rendered page, is code. But it seems like the instructions and markup that generate that document can be considered code.
If it's still confusing, blame Von Neumann. Code and data are basically indistinguishable.
This seems like a kind of unusual thing for Apple, but they're also offering a 30-day free trial of Motion 1.0. It's not the new version, but for people that wonder what Motion can do, or bored Slashdorks, it should be interesting.
Note: it requires a system with a fairly recent video card.
Simple solution: Make the font GPL, but if you use it in documentation, it's not subject to GPL, only if the font's used in a program like Scribus, Word, Open Office, and so forth.
That's basically what the "experimental exception" bit was about. Though to clarify the issue (muddied by the inaccurate Slashdot post) -- the problem was over embedding a font in a document. In that case, you're including code (typefaces are bytecode) in a larger work, which the GPL is pretty clear about.
The real conclusion is that the GPL isn't such a good idea for typefaces. For what it's worth, it doesn't even sound like there are any.
I don't recall Microsoft owning my documents because I used their Wingdings font.
You're confusing several different issues. First, Microsoft wouldn't "own" your documents like this because Wingdings isn't under the GPL.
However, Wingdings is still subject to the license that Microsoft granted you to use it. You can't (under that license) copy it to another computer that doesn't have it. If you embed it in a Word document, and sent it to another computer, that computer will be able to display it, but not use it in other documents, unless it already has it.
Second, "owning" isn't even right in reference to the GPL -- the issue is whether the GPL of the embedded font "infects" your document, making it GPL. Even then, it's your copyrighted document, and you are free to re-license it as you please. You just can't legally license it as anything but GPL as long as you have that embeded GPL typeface.
Again, the only real conclusion here is that the GPL isn't really a good way to license fonts. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
I have to agree, the largest failing of Linux (and Java for that matter) is a good set of fonts. Why not make a bunch of truely Public Domain fonts so everyone can use them?
There are plenty of public domain faces out on the web, but they're mostly of the novelty variety, and aren't really terribly relevant. Excepting them, here is why this hasn't happened yet:
1) Good type design is pretty hard. 2) Good type design for all-purpose screen fonts is really hard. 3) Tools are either expensive or crap. 4) Good type designers cost money. 5) There just isn't much incentive. 6) Open source community attitude toward design issues generally sucks.
It's a good idea, but the people to convince are professional type designers and foundries. Bitstream Vera is a (the only?) example I can think of like this, though it's merely under "generous copyright".
If the font can't be copyrighted, but only the font name can be copyrighted, then how would using a GPL'd font cause a problem again? Something is a miss here. Is this just Sunday evenning foolery?
The true issue was poorly represented by the post (blah blah Slashdot "editors" blah blah). It was about embedding fonts in a document. Since digital typefaces are bytecode, it seems very clear that embedding them in a larger work would work exactly as embedding any other GPL code into a larger work. A few replies after the linked message is a much more enlightening one.
The other point of confusion I see is the difference between copyright and licensing, which type's unique status makes it hard to explain. To clarify what I said in the last post about copying/duplicating : you can copy in the analog sense -- you make make your face look like theirs, but you can't copy in the digital sense of making it exactly the same. As I said before, it's all very weird.
I think what this all points to (and the above link seems to agree) is that the GPL probably isn't a good idea for typefaces, at least not in it's current form. It wasn't really written with them in mind, and confusion like this is the result.
I may be leaving something out re: type copyrights, as I am only a dilletante typophile, and don't have a professional understanding of the subject.
Perhaps you're not aware that type design is a pretty big business, and that good fonts are an exceptionally valuable product to those who are able to craft them.
There's also the curious case that typefaces can't be copyrighted in the US. They are considered "property", but not "intellectual property", or something to that effect, while the names can be trademarked. So, they can be copied ("Arial" is basically a copy of "Helvetica", for instance), but not duplicated (you can't call your Helvetica-clone face "Helvetica").
It's all very weird and it doesn't surprise me that there are strange legal possibilites cropping up. Type property rights have been argued over for as long as there has been type.
Under today's ridiculous copyright interpretation I can very much believe that having a font used in a document would mean the document was legally a derivative of the font.
This might be a fair criticism, if not for the fact that, in the United States, typefaces cannot be copyrighted at all.
The font is a part of the finished document in a way the gimp isn't a part of a picture and gcc isn't a part of the code it makes.
The issue is of fonts embedded in the document. It's just like including any other GPLed code, except in in this case, the code is the typefaces' bytecode.
Google is becoming the one-stop shop for information. While I know their motto is, "Do no evil", I can't help but feel a little squeamish about it.
Consider that Google is a one-stop shop for information which is available elsewhere. If Google vanished right now, the internet would not grind to a halt. They don't really provide anything unique (that I can think of) -- they just do it better.
My other half keeps reminding me that all the attempts at wonderful unified systems have failed, and that it is ugly systems that are good at gluing together disparate, but existing technologies that succeed. But I don't care. I still would like to see it tried even if it does fail.
Revolutionary new interfaces suffer more from being new than being revolutionary. New interfaces are never perfect -- they must evolve over time. You have to give yourself a wide berth to be wrong, and the worst way to do that is to start from scratch with a rigid plan.
There's also the fact no matter how unified your desktop interface is, it still has to interact with a world that doesn't use the same. I think that most "thesis UI's" fail because bridging them with the rest of the world's tools winds up feeling even more hackish than the interfaces they're intended to replace.
I tend to think of Gelernter's LifeStreams. It's a very elegant and interesting concept, with lots of good ideas. The trouble is that it doesn't work unless everybody else is using it, or if you limit it's functionality to things that work with it's metaphor. That is, when you try to communicate with the world that doesn't use it, it starts to suck. (The commercial implementation is a pale reflection of the grand idea.)
I basically agree with you, but I think the approach to such an interface has to be mostly evolutionary -- instead of dictating a unified environment, create a framework that encourages (and indeed, attracts) developers and users to adopt something closer to that ideal form.
Unfortunately, lots of gamers are less critical than that. Such as Orson Scott Card, who claims to have achieved great historical insight from playing Civilization
There is a difference between insight and knowledge.
It's entirely possible to learn some general ideas about the growth and development and fall of civilizations by playing a game. You may not get very deep insights, but you're not likely to get those in school, either, and we require kids to play that game.
I don't know exactly what he's claimed, but I know that I learned more from Civilization II's built-in Civopedia, which had tons of historical information, than I did in history class. More importantly, CivII got me much more interested in history than any class.
Slashdot Mirror
The BSD license doesn't require that they make their changes available.
Did I imply that it did? In any event, they *do* make changes available, just not under the GPL.
My point was that it doesn't matter, because the code you want (that to handle resource forks) will be available, and under the GPL.
"Why is it that so many small or independent developers give us so much quality software, often without reward, and huge companies like AOL can only spit out this bloated garbage?"
Because small developers (even freeware/open source) have to compete for mindshare to survive. An established giant like AOL or Microsoft with a captive audience does not. They stagnate, and begin to focus on extracting more money from said captive audience than gaining a larger, more loyal, or happier audience.
The little guy's product has to be better to be successful; the big guy's product just has to be branded.
The smartest companies (Apple, Google, et al.) learn how to do both.
Is the code open so I can update the GNU utilities? (Despite Apple's "commitment" to Open Source, I highly doubt it. But maybe they'll surprise me.)
As part of Darwin 8.0, I would expect the code for cp and mv to be licenced under the APSL, which, dispite being Free, is incompatable with the GPL. So, the code is available, but it can't be added to GNU tools, due to restrictions in the GPL.
However, rsync is GPLed (and they're shipping a modified rsync), so the code necessary to do what you want will be available under the GPL anyway. (In fact, it's been available in RsyncX for a while.)
I don't see why you would doubt Apple abiding by the licenses of the code they use. As far as I know, they've never been accused of not doing so.
Hold on a second, you're telling me MSN has an integrated tool which indexes and searches my entire desktop, including e-mail and file contents?
The product which you are describing was purely a reactionary move. Spotlight was announced and distributed in June, Microsoft bought the company on which the MSN desktop search is based in July. I sincerely doubt they were working on a pre-WinFS product before Apple demonstrated Spotlight.
Saying either "copied" the other is wrong, but certainly Microsoft is just throwing money against everything Apple (et al) does. This is a stupid way of operating, and as a consumer and a developer, I find that Microsoft's products suffer from it.
I'm sure if you look deeper you'll notice other things like core video behaving very much like Microsoft's GDI+, albeit a bit more advanced since it's a lot newer.
Bullshit. Pure bullshit. You know nothing of either of these technologies. Your other claims are at least arguable, but this is not. It would even be fair to say that Avalon (in Longhorn) is more advanced than Apple's display tech, but comparing GDI+ to Quartz+CoreImage is a joke.
Oddly enough, "It Just Works" is the #1 Reason to Switch to Mac.
Because, as we know "It Just Works" was invented by Apple.
Uh, actually, IIRC, it was a significant part of their ad copy at one point. The reason Umbuntu, etc. use it is because it's so closely associated with Apple-quality products. It may not be a trademark, but it is definitely associated with Apple. Perhaps you didn't know this.
FWIW, they still use it sometimes.
For Microsoft to adopt it is (in addition to being laughable) a shot across Apple's bow.
Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage.
Which is why you don't have to for the system to work. Yes, the more metadata that's available, the better, but it doesn't suddenly break down (as you seem to be saying) if you're inconsistent. If you organize at all, it works better. If you don't, it still works better than it used to.
Also, invoking "Metacrap" is basically meaningless, as the entire piece is about the use of metadata on the Internet, which is a vastly different scenario than on the desktop. I don't see how any of the seven points really applies.
On the internet, the producer of the metadata and the consumer are not the same, and have very different desires. On the desktop, you are the consumer of your own metadata. You have much more incentive to do it well, and much less incentive to do it poorly (lie). If you add keywords like "v1agra pr0n britney spears" to your documents , it's nobody's problem but your own.
If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless
This might be true if the system *only* used metadata, but it doesn't. Plain text files don't have any kind of user-added metadata at all, but you can still find them by content, or filename, or create/modify dates, etc.
If i was confronted by Java Source Code for a program, I wouldn't be able to read it and I would not know what to describe it as.
This is a horrible example for some point I cannot fathom. Why on earth would you *need* to describe something that you can't read? Why would you even care if the file is effectively meaningless to you? Why would you need to describe a source file at all, when all of the useful information would be part of the content index?
Maybe you should learn more about a subject before likening it to Communism.
Apple has done great, but they have clearly ignored their own UI rules for the sake of eye candy at times.
HIG stands for Human Interface Guidelines. If they were "rules" they would be stupid, because there are no absolute rules to design, and pretending there are leads to bad designs. Without such guidelines, you'd end up with even worse designs. Look at Open Source GUIs (if you must).
Really, the HIG should be titled "Interface Design for People That Can't be Trusted to Design Decent Interfaces without Handholding: THIS MEANS YOU!!!"
Mail, in OS X, is even a third window gui(?), it isn't quite Aqua, and has noticable differences unlike any other application on OS X.
The toolbar pinstripes have been replaced by a gradient, and they stopped using a drawer. That is all. It is not the end of the world. It can even be turned off as easily as the metal.
My question is: Where did they get a "telepathy-proof room"?
Quoth the original paper:
Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.
If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. The situation could be regarded as analogous to that which would occur if the interrogator were talking to himself and one of the competitors was listening with his ear to the wall. To put the competitors into a "telepathy-proof room" would satisfy all requirements.
Now, if you think it's safe for the critical scientific eye to discard this part of the test, why be so literal with the remainder? It's not clear (to me anyway) whether Turing addressed this because he actually believed in it, whether it was just the belief of the day, or whether he simply wished to cover all possibilities, meaning for it to be taken as a thought experiment more than a scienfic procedure; perhaps it was all of these.
My point is that using the original paper's description of the test (Turing's test) is just throwing out 55 years of research and debate over what intellegence is, and how to identify it.
It's a brilliant paper, certainly, but it is not the final word on anything. Treating it like it is is a great way to get ALICE in the news, but it's a great step backwards when trying to come up with a real measure of machine intellegence (a Turing test).
And I don't see how this is remotely new. Apple has had Sherlock since OS 8, and Find File since well before that. Microsoft has had the Find command on the Start menu since Windows 95. Where's the beef?
The key difference is that modern search features are actually useful. Remember why Google got so popular? Not because search engines were new, but because Google actually found what you were looking for.
Plenty of people can say "I never use Find" -- but that has much more to do with the fact that Find functions have mostly sucked than with people not wanting to find files.
What I've realized in the past 24 hours is that this panic is caused by the same flawed understanding of type that caused Congress to explicity deny typefaces copyright protection.
The theory was that if typefaces were copyrightable, then the type designer could wield those rights over any user of the face. Somehow this was construed to mean that a newspaper could be forced to censor itself if the type's creator didn't like what they printed with his typeface. So instead of clarifying the law to excempt such theoretical (but not realistic) possibilities, they excluded typefaces from copyright alltogether.
So instead, they are treated more like real property, dispite resembling in every way intellectual property. Whereas you can own a book without owning the story it contains, owning a font is like owning a hammer.
In practice, companies that sell fonts require license agreements that prohibit you from copying them and so forth. However, this is not the same as copyright. It's an agreement between two parties, not a right afforded to you by the government.
So, the hammer salesman requires you to agree not to share your hammer before he'll sell it to you.
The words can still be used without the font, and the meaning, value, or level of protection needed do not change as a result of removing the font (other than how the document looks), how can the GPL "infect" the content of the document?
It doesn't infect the content in that way. Once you remove the font, you can do anything you want with your copyrighted text. However, if you had released it previously under the GPL, then that version continues to be GPLed.
I'll say again the only really conclusive point in this whole story: the GPL is not suitable for fonts.
Fonts can't be copyrighted (at least, they can't in the US). Seems like the same argument could be made against Copyleft:
Indeed, but it's weirder than that.
The confusion basically stems from the fact that the law takes something that in all ways resembles intellectual property, and instead treats it like physical property. Imagine if a written story were treated as entirely dependent on the page it was printed on. If you photocopied the page, the author would have no rights over your copy at all. (This is why copyright exists in the first place!)
Basically, while you can't copyright a typeface, it is still your property, and you still can dictate terms to the people you sell it to.
I can sell you a car on the condition that you not sell it to anyone else. If you do, I can sue you for breaking our contract. However, I can't sue the person you sold it to if he sells it, because the car is no longer mine. I have no rights over the car once it leaves my ownership.
This works in the physical world because you can't simply "copy and paste" a car to have 2 cars.
The (flawed) idea behind the US interpretation is that if type could be copyrighted, then type makers could wield those rights over users of that type. If you designed the type that a book used, and didn't like what the book was about, you could demand that they stop using your type. (It is exactly the same fear being instilled in this article.)
This make logical sense in a vacuum (like Congress), but is completely at odds with the way type has always worked before, and continues to work in other countries. It's purely a hypothetical situation, and one that could be prevented by some means other than completely excluding typefaces from copyright protections.
It's also worth noting that the non-copyrightability of type in the US is widely opposed. It isn't the first time the US has been stupid about IP rights.
If fonts are not intellectual property, though, then how can a font be GPL'ed? Or, for that matter, how can commercial font makers prevent others from distributing their fonts for free (possibly with a new name)?
When you buy a typeface, say from Adobe, there are terms and conditions to the purchase that you have to agree to. These include not copying them, etc. It's a contractual agreement, not copyright. As I said before, they can be considered property, but not intellectual property. With IP, your right to license it stems from your holding the copyright. With real property, your right to license it stems from your posession of it.
Basically, they don't hand it over unless you agree not to share it. They can't, apparently, go after people that acquired them "in the wild", which is why you don't have the "TIAA" busting down doors to go after "type pirates".
(Again, I'm not 100% certain about much of this. Most of my awareness of the subject comes from osmosis.)
Are you sure that fonts are code? I would have thought that the font rendering engine is the code and the representation of each character within the font is data.
The confusion stems from the fact that fonts contain both outline shapes and glyph instructions that programmatically modify those shapes. The shapes could easily be argued are just data, but the instructions operate like any other interpreted language. (OpenType/TrueType might even be Turing-complete. I know for sure that PostScript and TeX are.)
I can also see rejecting the idea of a document being code -- but say you've got an HTML document with PHP embedded in it, to be interpreted. Nobody is arguing that the output, the interpreted and rendered page, is code. But it seems like the instructions and markup that generate that document can be considered code.
If it's still confusing, blame Von Neumann. Code and data are basically indistinguishable.
This seems like a kind of unusual thing for Apple, but they're also offering a 30-day free trial of Motion 1.0. It's not the new version, but for people that wonder what Motion can do, or bored Slashdorks, it should be interesting.
Note: it requires a system with a fairly recent video card.
Simple solution: Make the font GPL, but if you use it in documentation, it's not subject to GPL, only if the font's used in a program like Scribus, Word, Open Office, and so forth.
That's basically what the "experimental exception" bit was about. Though to clarify the issue (muddied by the inaccurate Slashdot post) -- the problem was over embedding a font in a document. In that case, you're including code (typefaces are bytecode) in a larger work, which the GPL is pretty clear about.
The real conclusion is that the GPL isn't such a good idea for typefaces. For what it's worth, it doesn't even sound like there are any.
I don't recall Microsoft owning my documents because I used their Wingdings font.
You're confusing several different issues.
First, Microsoft wouldn't "own" your documents like this because Wingdings isn't under the GPL.
However, Wingdings is still subject to the license that Microsoft granted you to use it. You can't (under that license) copy it to another computer that doesn't have it. If you embed it in a Word document, and sent it to another computer, that computer will be able to display it, but not use it in other documents, unless it already has it.
Second, "owning" isn't even right in reference to the GPL -- the issue is whether the GPL of the embedded font "infects" your document, making it GPL. Even then, it's your copyrighted document, and you are free to re-license it as you please. You just can't legally license it as anything but GPL as long as you have that embeded GPL typeface.
Again, the only real conclusion here is that the GPL isn't really a good way to license fonts. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
I have to agree, the largest failing of Linux (and Java for that matter) is a good set of fonts. Why not make a bunch of truely Public Domain fonts so everyone can use them?
There are plenty of public domain faces out on the web, but they're mostly of the novelty variety, and aren't really terribly relevant. Excepting them, here is why this hasn't happened yet:
1) Good type design is pretty hard.
2) Good type design for all-purpose screen fonts is really hard.
3) Tools are either expensive or crap.
4) Good type designers cost money.
5) There just isn't much incentive.
6) Open source community attitude toward design issues generally sucks.
It's a good idea, but the people to convince are professional type designers and foundries. Bitstream Vera is a (the only?) example I can think of like this, though it's merely under "generous copyright".
If the font can't be copyrighted, but only the font name can be copyrighted, then how would using a GPL'd font cause a problem again? Something is a miss here. Is this just Sunday evenning foolery?
The true issue was poorly represented by the post (blah blah Slashdot "editors" blah blah). It was about embedding fonts in a document. Since digital typefaces are bytecode, it seems very clear that embedding them in a larger work would work exactly as embedding any other GPL code into a larger work. A few replies after the linked message is a much more enlightening one.
The other point of confusion I see is the difference between copyright and licensing, which type's unique status makes it hard to explain. To clarify what I said in the last post about copying/duplicating : you can copy in the analog sense -- you make make your face look like theirs, but you can't copy in the digital sense of making it exactly the same. As I said before, it's all very weird.
I think what this all points to (and the above link seems to agree) is that the GPL probably isn't a good idea for typefaces, at least not in it's current form. It wasn't really written with them in mind, and confusion like this is the result.
I may be leaving something out re: type copyrights, as I am only a dilletante typophile, and don't have a professional understanding of the subject.
I mean, come on, it's a damned font.
Perhaps you're not aware that type design is a pretty big business, and that good fonts are an exceptionally valuable product to those who are able to craft them.
There's also the curious case that typefaces can't be copyrighted in the US. They are considered "property", but not "intellectual property", or something to that effect, while the names can be trademarked. So, they can be copied ("Arial" is basically a copy of "Helvetica", for instance), but not duplicated (you can't call your Helvetica-clone face "Helvetica").
It's all very weird and it doesn't surprise me that there are strange legal possibilites cropping up. Type property rights have been argued over for as long as there has been type.
Under today's ridiculous copyright interpretation I can very much believe that having a font used in a document would mean the document was legally a derivative of the font.
This might be a fair criticism, if not for the fact that, in the United States, typefaces cannot be copyrighted at all.
The font is a part of the finished document in a way the gimp isn't a part of a picture and gcc isn't a part of the code it makes.
The issue is of fonts embedded in the document. It's just like including any other GPLed code, except in in this case, the code is the typefaces' bytecode.
With this army of artificially enhanced super cats they should soon be able to complete their plans for world domination (TM)
You're forgetting the "Don't Be Evil" policy. In reality, they plan to use this army of artificially encanced super cats for world liberation.
Google is becoming the one-stop shop for information. While I know their motto is, "Do no evil", I can't help but feel a little squeamish about it.
Consider that Google is a one-stop shop for information which is available elsewhere. If Google vanished right now, the internet would not grind to a halt. They don't really provide anything unique (that I can think of) -- they just do it better.
You, sir, have just made my friends list.
My other half keeps reminding me that all the attempts at wonderful unified systems have failed, and that it is ugly systems that are good at gluing together disparate, but existing technologies that succeed. But I don't care. I still would like to see it tried even if it does fail.
Revolutionary new interfaces suffer more from being new than being revolutionary. New interfaces are never perfect -- they must evolve over time. You have to give yourself a wide berth to be wrong, and the worst way to do that is to start from scratch with a rigid plan.
There's also the fact no matter how unified your desktop interface is, it still has to interact with a world that doesn't use the same. I think that most "thesis UI's" fail because bridging them with the rest of the world's tools winds up feeling even more hackish than the interfaces they're intended to replace.
I tend to think of Gelernter's LifeStreams. It's a very elegant and interesting concept, with lots of good ideas. The trouble is that it doesn't work unless everybody else is using it, or if you limit it's functionality to things that work with it's metaphor. That is, when you try to communicate with the world that doesn't use it, it starts to suck. (The commercial implementation is a pale reflection of the grand idea.)
I basically agree with you, but I think the approach to such an interface has to be mostly evolutionary -- instead of dictating a unified environment, create a framework that encourages (and indeed, attracts) developers and users to adopt something closer to that ideal form.
The nice thing about the Statue of Liberty is you can switch between the governments without the 1 to 3 turn penalty of civil unrest.
You mean, like switching from Democracy to Fundamentalism?
Unfortunately, lots of gamers are less critical than that. Such as Orson Scott Card, who claims to have achieved great historical insight from playing Civilization
There is a difference between insight and knowledge.
It's entirely possible to learn some general ideas about the growth and development and fall of civilizations by playing a game. You may not get very deep insights, but you're not likely to get those in school, either, and we require kids to play that game.
I don't know exactly what he's claimed, but I know that I learned more from Civilization II's built-in Civopedia, which had tons of historical information, than I did in history class. More importantly, CivII got me much more interested in history than any class.