Community, Incorporated

The argument for free fonts

Posted in:

Business and Open Source
Licensing

Bring up free fonts around typeface designers, and you'll probably get an earful about the relative quality of free and open source designs against the professionally designed fonts. Mark Pilgrim, over on Dive into Mark gives an earful back. The context here is a discussion of using dynamic Web fonts (a typeface, to be more accurate) in site design, where the publishers are insisting that applications (like the Web browser you're using right now) be upgraded to allow for a permission table that can allow (or deny) you to use a specific font. Back to the quality issue. When you bring up open source fonts, professional designers will tell you how horrible they are, how they're not well-designed, they lack full support for all characters, etc. Much of this, unfortunately, is true. Pilgrim concedes the quality issue, but points out the major disadvantage to professionally designed (and proprietary) fonts -- because of licensing, we can't use them.

Dynamic web fonts are coming. Actually they’re already here, but most of Our People haven’t noticed yet. But they will, and that’s going to be a huge boon to somebody. I see you’ve decided that it won’t be you. Well, have fun shuffling your little bits of metal around. The rest of us will be over here, using the only fonts we’re allowed to use: Everything But Yours.

Pilgrim gets a wee bit worked up about this, but he's right: Proprietary fonts are a problem for designers as well as free software projects. The openSUSE community has run into this on several fronts. We used to ship Agfa fonts with openSUSE, but they had a restrictive license and had to go out the door when we reworked our distribution license. Instead, we're using the Liberation fonts now for openSUSE. Our "official" font for marketing materials and the like is Cholla, but that's a proprietary font as well -- meaning that if we want the community to be able to create artwork to promote the project, they have to have a copy of Cholla or they won't be able to replicate the "official" look and feel. (Which is why Jakub Steiner started the Fifth Leg font, which is meant to be a drop-in replacement at some point for Cholla.) It's a roadblock, but one the community will eventually work around. As Pilgrim says, "Well, have fun shuffling your little bits of metal around. The rest of us will be over here, using the only fonts we’re allowed to use: Everything But Yours."

posted by Joe Brockmeier
April 24, 2009 @ 6:06 am

Previous Post: What does Oracle mean for Sun’s open source efforts?
Next Post: Oprah comes, Oprah goes: Who cares?

Last 10 posts:

Quick thoughts on the (possible) demise of OpenSolaris (07-13)
Microsoft sneaks in Firefox extension via Update (05-31)
What do you want for free? Do users have to pay up to complain? (05-13)
Using selfishness to put crowds to work for you (05-07)
Miro puts code up for adoption (04-30)
Oprah comes, Oprah goes: Who cares? (04-29)
The argument for free fonts (04-24)
What does Oracle mean for Sun's open source efforts? (04-20)
Prioritizing bugs to boost Linux adoption (04-18)
Yet another "Mac vs. PC" article that misses the point (04-16)