[OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Tom Phinney on Libre Fonts

[nooalf at aol.com]

Early & often iz a bad idea. Even if your investment in your product iz minimal and you are giving it away, you will earn a bad reputation. A bad rep iz much harder to overcome than no rep. 


Get stuff az ready for prime time az you can before releasing it. Yes, its not going to be perfect, but it haz to be at least good enuf the be useful. Leave the customer with more plusez than minusez and they will be willing to give the next version a chans. 



-----Original Message-----
From: Vernon Adams <vern at newtypography.co.uk>
To: Open Font Library <openfontlibrary at lists.freedesktop.org>
Sent: Thu, Oct 17, 2013 10:57 am
Subject: Re: [OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Tom Phinney on Libre Fonts



On 17 Oct 2013, at 02:39, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 01:15:44AM -0700, Vernon Adams wrote:
>> Pablo clearly 'gets it' :)
>> 
>> I assume that the response from people who "dont get it" would be that
>> you should have both; 'freedom' and 'quality', and i wouldn't argue
>> with that, it's a good target. But...
> 
> We should. I find the praising of bad quality fonts very troubling and
> denigrating to the free software movement. Free software has always been
> about freedom, true, but also it always strived for the for the highest
> standards, and we should do the same in libre fonts, not justify doing
> lousy jobs because it is more “ground breaking” because that is a false
> dichotomy.

Khaled,
On the designers side of things i don't know what 'praising of bad quality 
fonts' might be, so i don't know what you might be referring to. Maybe you are 
getting the wrong end of the stick? :)

I think you have described below, the way free software has generally approached 
output. 'Early and often' is by it's nature, accepting that 'quality' is a 
moveable bar at the release stage. I've used free software long enough to have 
heard all the old arguments of why 'early and often' is a 'threat to quality' 
and therefore 'bad for users', etc, etc. Through those 20+ years though adoption 
of free software methods has ballooned, and the world is still spinning :)

-v

> 
> I’m a big fan of incremental improvements; “release early, release
> often”, and I had released very defective fonts (to my standard) because
> I believe in user participation of improving the quality (and people did
> participate, though not by actual hacking on the fonts), but that has
> always been an interim measure not a goal, and such releases are
> usually accompanied with big warnings so that people know what they are
> getting into.
> 
> Regards,
> Khaled


 
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