[Openfontlibrary] Transmogrifying Free Fonts into CA$H

[Jon Phillips]

<topPost /> 

Dave, please put this great write-up on this onto our wiki here:

http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/index.php/Making_Living

As a person doing 1B (although not cushy ;), I can say that being a
contributor to Open Source and good at positioning yourself with good
reputation will most definitel lead to 1 if you want it...

Jon

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 16:09 +0000, Dave Crossland wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> How can a typeface designer and font developer make a living releasing
> fonts under the OFL and publishing free information on typeface
> design?
> 
> The common conversations since Napster about how to pay musicians or
> film makers or other commercial artists in the age of computer
> networks is the same as the issue of how to pay font designers.
> 
> Richard Stallman explores some ideas about this in his 'Copyright
> versus Community' speech, and a video of the one he gave at my college
> a few years ago is a 300Mb download at
> 
> http://www.archive.org/download/copyrightvscommunity_stallman/RichardStallman.mp4
> 
> Here's how I see it:
> 
> 0. Work another job and do this for the art, like "REAL" artists ;-)
> Though joking aside, I have a friend who is a drummer who did this for
> a while and now has enough gigs to not do another job, and I'm
> basically doing it myself, though my situation is improbable.
> 
> 1. Get a cushy job that pays a salary to do it, like
> 
>  A. Academia
> 
>  B. GNU+Linux Distributors, eg Andy Fitzsimon at Red Hat
> 
>     * Red Hat (USA, Australia where Andy is, at least)
> 
>     * Canonical (London, Canada, but mostly people at
>       home worldwide)
> 
>     * Novell (bought SuSE thats from Germany, mostly USA)
> 
>     * Mandriva (Mandrake and something else merged to
>       form Mandriva; Mandrake was French, the other end
>       was Brasilian?)
> 
>   C. Obscure institutions, eg Victor Gaultney at SIL
> 
> 2. Release fonts to the public, hope to get a reputation and large
> donations for continued extensive development from a few heavy users,
> micropayments [1] from many light users, and purchases of glossy
> packaging like specimen books and T shirts and stuff - the usual
> promotional stuff that small independent foundries like Underware do
> to get people to hand over cash for stuff that any small child can get
> their grubby unlicensed hands on -
> http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=fonts+torrent etc
> 
> 3. Release fonts to the public as promotional material for attracting
> FontSmith/DaltonMaag style corporate patronage.
> 
> 4. Though not flush with Free Software ideals, Raph is proposing to
> publish basic fonts as Free Software and advanced fonts as Proprietary
> Software [2]. He has a lot of experience with making a living from
> Free Software, and the way GhostScript for many years released a GPL
> Ghostscript 365 days after the release of a
> Free-for-non-commercial-use AFPL GhostScript seems like an okay
> compromise to me. Xara [3] is pursuing a similar compromise model.
> 
> [1]: Micropayments is a done deal with paypal, netbanx et al (google
> has one, even) though not the anonymous way that Richard would like to
> see, but I'm not that big on privacy stuff (eg I'll carry a mobile
> phone and use a debit card a lot instead of cash)
> 
> [2]: "I may also use this font as an experiment in licensing. I plan
> to release the "basic" version with caps, digits, punctuation, and
> unconnected lowercase freely under the OFL (this will include the
> optically scaled variants as well). I also hope to develop a carefully
> made connected script which uses OpenType contextual alternates to
> achieve flowing connectedness, and this version will likely be offered
> commercially." - http://levien.com/type/myfonts/ofl.html
> 
> [3]: http://www.xaralx.org
> 
> I'm currently doing 0, and maybe in the future might land 1 or 2, and
> am not against doing 3 if it comes along. At this point in time I'm
> against 4, but I'm young and idealistic, and can understand why other
> feel differently ;-)
> 
> --
> Regards,
> Dave
> _______________________________________________
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> Openfontlibrary at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary
> 
-- 
Jon Phillips

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