[luau] Mozilla 1.2.1 released

[Ray Strode]

>  Adobe (and probably to some extent, Microsoft) owns the rendering 
> engine, which is proprietary, and libraries for ttf.

Actually, I believe microsoft and apple own the rights to truetype.

I think that Adobe created postscript which was used to make scalable 
fonts, before truetype existed.  Then I think Apple created truetype to 
solve certain deficiencies with Type1 (postscript) fonts.  Microsoft 
copied apple and released itsown truetype implementation, which wass 
steadily developed for a few years, then Adobe and Microsoft allied to 
create the OpenType specification, which specifies a font format that 
can contain both postscript and truetype data.

The specification is freely available, but supposedly misleading and 
incorrect in places.  Nevertheless, from the specification and from 
experimentation, the freetype project created an open source library for 
reading truetype and opentype fonts. This library was first used by 
special independent x font servers (back in the XFree86 3.3.x days) to 
give X truetype font support.  Later, when XFree86 4.0 made its debut, 
it had freetype built in, so X could natively support truetype fonts.

Now there is Xft which also uses freetype.  See my other mail on this 
thread for more information about how Xft works.

>   OTOH, while you cannot copyright a truetype font (or any other 
> font), you can trademark its name.  Without a license, which is 
> unlikely to be granted by Microsoft, a Linux distro cannot legally 
> distribute many of the popular truetype fonts such as Times New Roman, 
> Arial, or many Microsoft fonts (mainly because of trademark infringement).

Well you certainly know more about legal issues than me, so I'm curious. 
 If you can't copyright a font, then why don't people just take fonts, 
rename them, and then redistribute them?

I know microsoft for a while (like a couple of years or more) made there 
Web Fonts (all the really good fonts they have) freely available to 
anyone who wanted them.  The license also didn't restrict redistribution 
of the fonts, so even though microsoft no longer distributes them, you 
can still get them legally online.  Now i'm wondering if the reason they 
didn't restrict redistribution was because they legally couldn't?

--Ray