Subject: Re: bug#44020: 28.0.50; Prefer selection of colour emoji fonts?

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2020 09:44:44 +0300

> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2020 20:30:41 +0100
> From: Alan Third <[email-masked]>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>, [email-masked], [email-masked]
> 
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 12:38:18PM +0200, Robert Pluim wrote:
> > >>>>> On Fri, 16 Oct 2020 13:26:42 +0300, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> said:
> > 
> >     Eli> Also, Noto Color Emoji has a free license, so it's okay for it to be
> >     Eli> in fontset.el, but it is not clear to me whether Apple Color Emoji is
> >     Eli> distributed under a free license.
> > 
> > Itʼs marked 'Copyright Apple 2011-2016' in the macOS font
> > selector. And Apple appear to be both sensitive and litigious about
> > it, so probably best not to promote it.
> 
> On the other hand it comes preinstalled, it only works on Apple
> devices, and Noto Color Emoji doesn't work on Apple devices. I'm not
> sure we'd really be "promoting" it.
> 
> IIRC Windows comes with Segoe UI Emoji preinstalled too.

Both are true, but AFAIK our policy until now was not to mention such
fonts in fontset.el.

Emoji is just one example, btw.  At least for MS-Windows, the latest
versions come with many good fonts that cover most of the scripts.  So
if the restriction to avoid mentioning proprietary fonts in fontset.el
could be lifted, we could produce a very capable and complete fontset
for MS-Windows.  I wouldn't be surprised if the same situation didn't
exist on macOS.  Not sure how things are on GNU/Linux, and what are
the differences between the distros in this respect.