[Openfontlibrary] name

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Karl!

(I hope Ellen and Jon and Victor or Nicolas can reply to this :-)

On 30/10/06, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
> Um, so as far as I can tell, this whole project is about "free" fonts.
> So why not change the name to Free Font Library to avoid the dual
> meaning of "OFL"?  It will be a constant confusion.

I believe both projects have reasons for their names.

I doubt either will change.

I think promoting dont-use-acronyms won't work.

I think the way Open Office is acronymed to OOo or OO.o maybe works:

Open Font License = OFL

Open Font Library = OFLO or OFLo or OFL.o

Or maybe it sucks :-)

But I think promoting context sensitivity and awareness of both
projects can help.

> (Or Freely Available Font Library.  Or something.)

IMHO "Freely Available" sounds like "free beer".

My *personal understanding* of the two projects reasons for their
names, and hope Jon and Victor or Nicolas can corroborate this:

Jon Phillips has set up OpenFontLibrary.org as a sister project of
OpenClipartLibrary.org

SIL has tried to evade preconceptions of the term "free fonts" in the
proprietary font community with the name "Open Font License".

Bear with me while I spout off on this:

There the term 'free fonts' is memetically contaminated; there is a
general perception in the public that ALL fonts are zero price, after
decades of applications bundling fonts and "10,000 Fonts for ONLY $3
so BUY NOW!!!1!!" CD-ROMs at the local market. This is revealed in
your use of quote marks around the word free, and it a big concern of
proprietary font developers.

My local type history museum - www.stbride.org - has propaganda
posters on the walls against such unlicensed file sharing, and its is
also present in the reactions to Ellen Lupton's presentation at ATypI
last month - www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html

Now personally I have affinity for the term 'Free Software' after my
experiences explaining stuff like firefox and wikipedia to the kind of
people who don't check their email every day.

I've found that the term 'open source' is flawed for this because it
is too much about technical stuff - I often get sidetracked explaining
what "source" is - and its jargon nature is reflected in the
surrounding philosophy of 'development methodology'.

Whereas the term 'Free Software' is initially confused by people. By
default as in 'free as in no money' but that's actually leverage to
communicate the philosophy of 'free as in freedom', or as I say it,
"free as in I have a free house tonight".

I include explaining that most Free Software is available without
spending money, but that is just because its honest about the Internet
[1] and there is some which you have to pay to get, and plenty of
non-free software you don't have to pay for.

And no one is confused any more, which I test by asking for an
intuitive grasp of what wikipedia is about and why it works.

But I recognise that not everyone sees things the same way as I do,
and perhaps to a proprietary font developer the name "Open Font
License" creates less recoil than "Free Font License".

Plus a lot of awareness-promotion has been done for the OFL, which I
consider the main (though less interesting ;-) reason for it not
changing.

Turning to OFLO, this is just a personal observation of mine, but I've
noticed that generally the Inkscape and Creative Commons communities
tend to use the phrase 'open source' more often than 'free software'.

While the OFLO hasn't become as established as OFL has, I doubt rejon
is up for changing it. And cross-promotion from the OCAL will be very
cool, and is smoother within a "Open * Library" umbrella brand name.

So until recently, the term 'free' was pretty absent in the emerging
community subscribed to this list. Why is it now cropping up?

Ellen Lupton coined the term 'free font movement' for her ATypI
presentation, and this is where I saw it first.

I suspect its ported from the term 'free software movement', which has
FSF momentum behind it, but the body of Ellen's presentation had a
general tendency towards the term 'open source', and slight blurring
of the 'free as in freedom' and 'free as in beer' concepts.

But Ellen putting "Free Font Movement" out in front of ATypI is a
pretty big deal.

I generally like the leverage I can get out of throwing the term free
out there as soon as possible. And I think that this is especially
important for fonts, since there a bucket loads of freeware fonts, so
the free-as-in-freedom thing needs extra attention.

I also think that 'Open Font' is maybe slightly memetically
contaminated by 'OpenType', though this is minor.

[1]: There's a nice half hour lecture about being honest about the
Internet at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8426887663831686611
:-)

-- 
Regards,
Dave