[Openfontlibrary] Fwd: UKFSN.org Profits Grants

[Dave Crossland]

I haven't heard back from UKFSN yet, not sure why...

On 29/10/06, Jon Phillips <jon at rejon.org> wrote:
>
> 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?

As I said in the other thread, I'm not sure where the funds would best
be used, it depends on what the projects goals are, and on what the
community can achieve without cash.

> 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

Ah, my bad - wont happen again :-)

> > 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...

Yes.

It might "liberate" some proprietary fonts, but I think this could not
be useful in terms of the message (as in action-as-communcation) it
would send to observers; which is that the free font movement needs
unsustainable bribery to progress.

> > 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.

Yes, I'm a bit of a tools-determinist anyway, but I feel this is
critical to our success.

The OFLB needs to focus on typographic quality, and develop a slick
webapp that is on par - or surpasses - proprietary foundry webapps
like myfonts.com

However. The Free Software Movement has proved that pure functional
software can be written without too much cash. And there are lots of
people who can cut code, especially from the PHP CMS webapp cloth. So
I personally think funding should first go to things that need a cash
based kickstart, like typeface design documentation - which requires
expertise rarely found in academia, let alone online in wikiworld :-)

> Oh, and collecting all the ones that exist.

Mmm.

This is an unresolved query in another thread:

Is the OFLB for collecting as many Free fonts as possible, and cataloging them?

Or is it for the development of new Free fonts?

Are these goals mutually exclusive?

> > 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.

With me tools-determinist predisposition, I agree :-)

-- 
Regards,
Dave