[Openfontlibrary] [OpenType] Proprietary (Off Topic)

[Christopher Fynn]

Dave Crossland wrote:

> Secondly, there is the specific case of the cashflow being positive.
> First there are the one-off cases: Ascender seems to have made money
> doing it recently for Google and Red Hat, and Evertype also did a paid
> free software font job recently. 

Exactly - when Red Hat and Google wanted fonts they did *not* turn to 
any of the developers of Free/Libré fonts (many of which which Red Hat 
has in its Linux distributions) they turned to the commercial Ascender 
Corp. which gets paid well to make and hint digital fonts. Ascender's 
other clients include Microsoft.

As far as I can make out Ascender Corp. have absolutely no commitment to 
Free/Libré fonts - they made or licensed these fonts on contract and 
once they sold rights and got the cash from Red Hat, it probably makes 
little difference to them what model and license Red Hat used to 
distribute them. (In fact they are getting good publicity for making 
fonts distributed under a GPL license - many people assume they donated 
them.)

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.

- Chris