Michael Kaplan wrote: > We rob NO ONE. We behave with honor and we wish others to do the same with > us. > Its a respect thing.
For sure. But you understand that this is politics as well. Many aspects of copyright and intellectual property, and even the very concept of private property, are still the subjects of political debate. In order for your noble statement to be totally effective, there must be no rich men or poor men to play Robin Hood with. But solving such economic dilemmas, as Sarasvati might remind us, is not the task for the public mailing list of a character encoding standard. Real-life down-to-hearth issues pop up every day on the Unicode List (probably because this is the roll-out phase of the standard). We recently discovered how IT people in India have to work sharing rented modem on old and slow telephone lines. It is not the task of Unicode to fix the telecomm infrastructure of India. Not to mention the problem of uneven distribution of resources in the world. So, in that occasion, this forum concentrated itself on answering a single pertaining question: is the size overhead of UTF-8 compatible with the situation of Internet in India? Luckily, the answer was yes: however slow is your Internet connection, the fact that UTF-8 uses 3 bytes for each Indic character won't make things worse, because plain text is an insignificant part of the overall size of an Internet document. About the issue that you raised regarding "software piracy", you should consider that in many countries it is easy to step into huge multi-floor shops which sell "illegal" copies of software and manuals. Feel free to disagree with this state of things, but please avoid publicly calling "pirates" people who just did what it is customary to do in most parts of the world. Or, probably, who just did a quick test. This is not fair, not appropriate, and not a technical approach to problems. By the way, I would not be so sure that at Microsoft Corp. they need your help to do their math. It is not the task of this forum to decide whether, for a major corporation, it is more important to be strict about copyright, rather than to be the first and best behavers on one of the most promising markets on the planet. It is OK to point out that such-and-such font is not supposed to be free (or that it is, but only provided you install the latest version of such-and-such operating system), or to inform that there also are free or shareware fonts out there that cover such-and-such Indic scripts. But I feel that this is not the proper place to settle legal issues about software distribution. JMHO. _ Marco
