Re: [ft-devel] max_instructions in ttfautohint

[Dave Crossland]

On 8 Jun 2015 8:35 pm, "Behdad Esfahbod" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 15-06-08 05:21 PM, Dave Crossland wrote:
> >
> > On 8 Jun 2015 8:15 pm, "Behdad Esfahbod" <address@hidden
> > <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 15-06-08 03:57 PM, Dave Crossland wrote:
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > On 8 June 2015 at 18:37, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden <mailto:address@hidden>
> > <mailto:address@hidden <mailto:address@hidden>>> wrote:
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >     >> is that a rethoric question? ;-)
> >> >     >
> >> >     > No, quite serious :)
> >> >
> >> >     How shall this work?  We have no influence on Microsoft...  It would
> >> >     be great if we could snip with the fingers, and the font guys there do
> >> >     a new release of the FontValidator immediately :-)
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > I have discussed with MS making a private distribution of the C# FontVal
> >> > source code to people who would like to work on a fresh derivative, which MS
> >> > would retain ownership of, but release under a simple permissive libre license
> >> > on Github.
> >>
> >> Why not they straight releasing it on github?
> >
> > Specifically: It's linked to their rasteriser and they won't share that, so
> > publishing it as-is with the rasterisation parts removed wouldn't be useful.
> >
> > Generally: at such old school companies who have yet to grasp the opportunity
> > costs of being precious with such things, it would be harder to get internal
> > approval for liberating anything outright compared to this method.
>
> So, same thing as Adobe ~1.5 years ago.  They need a *guarantee* that they
> will get contributions.  Which doesn't quite work.  Your best bet is to show
> them that *any* piece of font-related code that has been open sourced has got
> lots of contributions, starting on the day after it was released. :)

I'm not sure it is the same, but overall yes I agree, and I think attempts by such companies to reduce their perceived risk and guarantee contributions become self fulfilling prophecies that reduce contribution because it makes their projects smell bad.

In this case ms isn't some mom and pop shop like Xara, they know full well what they are doing, and this was the only way to salvage the sinking ship that is fontval.