Adobe 以 Apache 2.0 授權釋出 OpenType 字型開發工具的原始碼

Adobe releases source code for OpenType font-development tools

Adobe made a surprise announcement at the annual ATypI conference in Barcelona, Spain, releasing one of the company's proprietary font-production tools under an open-source license. In addition, the team convinced another popular font-development project to release its core library as open source, too. Adobe framed the release as a move designed to help improve the quality of fonts produced with any application, but there may be other benefits as well—such as increasing the spread of Adobe's own open fonts. Up until now, those fonts have not been redistributable by many other free-software projects, precisely because the production tools needed to build them remained closed.

Adobe 於 2014.9 在西班牙巴塞隆娜舉辦的 ATypeI conference 宣布將以 Apache 2.0 授權釋出 OpenType 字型開發工具 Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO)，其實在 Windows / Mac 平台，這些工具從 2000 年就可免費下載使用了，但但自由軟體的世界，僅僅免費是不夠的，自由軟體還有授權相容性的問題，有些 project 甚至不接受使用私有(proprietary)工具編譯出來的 binary font，而 Adobe 對這些困境的回應，就是開放 AFDKO 的授權，如此一來，將有更多人可使用他們的工具來改善字型的品質，更多 project 可以使用他們的成果。

文中亦簡述了 Adobe 深信開放規格的價值與重要性，從 Postscript、PDF、Type I Font Format 到 Compact Font Format，都有開放規格，看來 Adobe 和 Microsoft 不太一樣。