[Openfontlibrary] Fwd: UKFSN.org Profits Grants

[Jon Phillips]

On Sun, 2006-10-29 at 13:20 +0000, Dave Crossland wrote: 
> Hi all,
> 
> Thought this might be of interest :-)

Hi Dave, what do you have in mind with this grant funding? Are you
hoping to get funding for the Open Font Library, publicity, development?

I'm curious what you are thinking?

I like grants, but one thing below is that the Open Font Library does
not have explicit support of Creative Commons, even though I work for
them and we are using ccHost, an Open Source project that Creative
Commons puts resources behind. However, I would say that this project is
more legally safe because of the use of CC and well off because I will
push for it at CC and elsewhere (so I am a definite ally ;)

Anyway, please catch us up on what you are thinking below...

Jon

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com>
> Date: 29-Oct-2006 13:18
> Subject: Re: [UKFSN Users] UKFSN Profits Grants
> To: Jason Clifford <jason at ukfsn.org>
> 
> 
> Hi Jason!
> 
> On 29/10/06, Jason Clifford <jason at ukfsn.org> wrote:
> >
> > Is there nobody on this list who could use a Free Software grant or
> knows
> > somebody who could benefit from this money?
> 
> I'm involved in the emerging Free Font Movement, and am looking at
> ways to fund its development, so this is awesome news.
> 
> The big news is this was recently presented as a keynote to the
> premier typeface and typography club www.ATypI.org at its annual
> conference by design academic Ellen Lupton -
> http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html
> 
> It has support from Creative Commons - www.openfontlibrary.org - the
> USA Tex Users Group - http://www.tug.org/tc/devfund/grants.html - and
> SIL International, who fund one fulltime typeface designer and have
> created a free license - http://scripts.sil.org/OFL - specifically for
> the needs of typeface developers and the peculiarities of font
> software (eg, a GPL font has FSF-acknowledged quirks when embedding in
> PDF)
> 
> I'm on the UKTUG committee - http://uk.tug.org - and we've created a
> £5,000 development fund for TeX related projects. I'll be applying for
> some funding from there, but currently need to do more research,
> discussion and thinking about what project would be best to pursue.
> 
> There seem to be three general categories:
> 
> 1. Community development: persuading GPL font developers to go OFL,
> persuading freeware font developers to go OFL, raising awareness of
> free fonts

I think that throwing money on this will not help...

> 2. Infrastructure development: better font development tools, better
> typeface design documentation, better community web applications for
> development of new fonts and cataloging of existing ones

I think this is the best use of the funds, so that we can get better
tools for editing, managing and hosting fonts. Oh, and collecting all
the ones that exist.

> 3. Font development: designing new typefaces and developing them as
> fonts

Yet again, I think that this one is more doable if we have better tools
and developers/artists.

> Is one of them a better fit for UKFSN funds than another?
> 
> --
> Regards,
> Dave
> 
> 
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-- 
Jon Phillips

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