Mr Watts, I apologise for taking the comments slightly off-topic.

In the meantime I will return to my work to encode scripts and characters in the Universal Character Set. Support that work if you can, please.

In this case a “request” and a “demand” would have yielded the same results, and thus the choice to “demand” instead of “request” is perhaps incorrect.

Indeed “insistence” is reasonable under these circumstances, but a “request” would have been even more so. Unless of course Mr. Watt had not heeded your request, or for some reason “insisting” was easier for you than “requesting”, which would be a shame.

I suppose that what I am trying (perhaps unsuccessfully) to say is that perhaps a less formal (or more amicable) approach would have yielded the same results. Assuming that Mr. Watt is not prone to illegally distributing copyrighted fonts on a regular basis, I see your “insistence” a little stern considering the circumstances.

Perhaps indeed that a bigger company would have not have been so lenient, but because someone else would have done more than you does not mean that you did any less.

I don’t know Mr. Watts, and I don’t even read his blog, I merely stumbled on this page but I couldn’t help but comment. It was the “Oh, and Mr Watt?” that spurred this on. If you were alarmed, it can hardly have been an afterthought.

Dave: Apple has made an agreement with me to distribute Mshtakan. Mr Watts did not. As it happens I have filed a bug with Apple and am providing them with an improved font.

Douglas: I didn’t “request” compliance from Andrew. I insisted on it in order to protect my intellectual property. I wish I were independently wealthy enough to give everything I do away for free. I’d love to do it. My life’s work — indeed my dharma — is to support the Universal Character Set and lesser-used languages and scripts. In the meantime, I have to make ends meet as well. It isn’t easy when one’s business model is “Psst… wanna buy an alphabet?”....

Note: I don’t think I was impolite to Mr Watts. I don’t know who he is (and couldn’t find out from this site). I’m pretty sure that had he been distributing a font owned by a really big company he’d have had a less congenial reply than the one I gave. I admit to being alarmed. Not to being “jumpy”.

Yes, the enforcing of copyright needs to be done, but since the redistribution was merely an improvement (and technically, as it fixes a bug that the original author has acknowledged, a required “improvement”) of the original and not a re-appropriation of the property, I think that the original author could have at least had the politeness to reply in a friendlier manner.

But then I suppose that nobody likes to have holes poked in their “intellectual property”.

[This does not, in any way, constitute an enticement or instigation of a flame war (we’ve all got a bit of legalese somewhere)]