Fwd: [Fwd: the ivory tower and the bazaar]

[Vasile Gaburici]

Stupid gmail doesn't reply to all recipients by default, so see below.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Fwd: the ivory tower and the bazaar]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
[http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/linux-fonts.png]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> -------- 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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