[Openfontlibrary] [OpenType] Proprietary (Off Topic)

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 6 novembre 2008 05:09, Christopher Fynn a écrit :

> 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.

You don't have to single out Red Hat, Google made pretty much the same
choice with Droid (and didn't bother licensing it clearly at the same
time).

I think the reasons have little to do with free/libre designer talent.
It's more like
- the people in charge of those decisions tend to be marketing/art
people not as sensitive to free/libre questions as other people in the
organisations
- (to beat an old drum) with very few exceptions free/libre font
creators fail massively at the distribution stage (licensing choice,
distribution format, etc) and do not project a reliable image. And the
people that could push free/libre solutions within organisations tend
to be put out by all this mess. A plain ttf file on a random web page
with no clear licence attached (or with a license buried in font
metadata), no vcs, no changelog, no bug tracker, not even a version is
not going to make people invest in you
- with very few exceptions free/libre font creators fail to organise
themselves in teams able to make publish regular enhancements to their
fonts. The lonely inspired artist may be very romantic, but to part
entities with some of them hard-earned cash you need to reassure on
your ability to deliver on time (you may object it's the same
proprietary font size but buyers see *foundries* that will allocate
manpower as needed to hit deadlines).

Success attracts success and the critical mass seems not to be there
yet. Though I think some of the creators of the most mature fonts
(dejavu, libertine, etc) could get themselves hired if they made some
concrete proposal to one of the Fedora/OpenSuse/Ubuntu community
leaders during ne of the numerous FLOSS conferences they regularly
attend.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot