[Openfontlibrary] [OpenType] Proprietary (Off Topic)

[Dave Crossland]

2008/11/6 Liam R E Quin <liam at holoweb.net>:
> 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 expect you can't answer this, but, how much _did_ Vera cost? :-)

> 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.

I'm sure it will :-)