[Openfontlibrary] [OpenType] Proprietary (Off Topic)

[Liam R E Quin]

On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 10:09 +0600, Christopher Fynn wrote:
[...]
> I'm not criticizing Ascender Corp. who do have particular expertise in 
> making highly legible screen fonts ~ but, for the money they spent, 
> could Red Hat not hire any one in the free/libré software community to 
> develop these fonts? Did they even try? Or maybe there was no one in the 
> free/libré font & software developer community capable of making such fonts.

I know that when we (Jim Gettys, Keith Packard and I) talked with
Bitstream, leading to getting Vera made available, we also contacted
a number of other font designers first. At the time we didn't find any
type designers who were working on free/Libre fonts and who could do
the necessary work in our price range -- one quote we got was for
between $100K and $150K, for example.  We knew we needed fonts that
would look good on the screen, and that had a solid character set.

I can't speak for why Red Hat went to Ascender, but right now it's
pretty hard to find someone willing to work on Free fonts and
with significant experience at type design, except by going down
the work-for-hire route.

Maybe openfontlibrary.org will change that.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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