-------- 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