[Openfontlibrary] Transmogrifying Free Fonts into CA$H

[Dave Crossland]

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