[Fwd: the ivory tower and the bazaar]

[Nicolas Mailhot]

-------- Message transféré --------
De: Gustavo Ferreira 
À: fedora-fonts-list-request
Sujet: the ivory tower and the bazaar
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:38:59 -0300

On Jul 20, 2008, at 2:50 PM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> If the free/open font scene was striving Red Hat needn't have  
> shelled a
> lot of money to a closed foundry like Ascender. Or the GNOME  
> Foundation
> needn't have done the same with Bitstream for Vera. Experience  
> shows it
> is very possible to extend a font with little coverage to more than
> decent one but it requires making a lot of noise around unfinished  
> font
> cores with correct licensing to get someone interested. And you don't
> get there via traditionnal ivory tower isolated font designer  
> workflow.

i have yet to see one good, original, well-made typeface developed in  
the bazaar way. can you name one?

also, please don't be ungrateful to the "isolated ivory-tower  
designer workflow", since it has produced the best foss-fonts out there.

i challenge the "free & open font crowd" to promote free/open fonts  
on the basis of their typographic quality, without appealing to below- 
the-belt demonization of "proprietary designers" and "proprietary  
tools".

> Teams was released in 2000 by TopTeam. It took 8 years before someone
> picked it up and started updating it (Edrip). Have Debian (and other
> distributions, sadly Fedora not included) wasted their time by
> publishing Teams for 8 years in its poor state? If they hadn't I
> strongly suspect Edrip would not have happened.
>
> We're seeding our future. Those things take time, a lot of time.  
> And the
> future will happen faster if people stop putting their heads in the
> sand, wasting time on proprietary fonts or font tools, and get to  
> work.

> During this year's LGM a concerted effort created a new nicely  
> licensed
> font from an old fossilizing one in a few days. Just a few years ago
> this would have been complete science fiction.

do you mean NotCourier Sans? i don't dislike the result, but let's be  
honest about it -- chopping off serifs from an existing font is not  
really type-design...

cheers,
- gustavo.


-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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