
Fuck the foundries - zcrar70
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-foundries
======
huhtenberg
I frequent typophile.com, which is _the_ online community of font designers,
and the topic of online font distribution and "alternative licensing" surfaces
every single month.

My takeaway from these conversations that the designers are (a) technically
clueless (b) conservative (c) and, pardon my French, scared sh*tless of losing
control over their fonts.

Latter is especially ironic, because they have no control to begin with. So
the general sentiments are exactly what is described in that quoted interview
- they expect someone to develop a magic bit and a DRM to enforce it and then
suddenly things will get much better.

Also just to illustrate the level of conservatism - someone who decides to
offer 1 font from a family of 10 for free is viewed as a revolutionary dude
with the balls of steel. Everyone enthusiastically cheers for him, but noone
follows.

In the end, it is really sad to see them burying their heads in the sand next
to the music industry.

~~~
marcusbooster
This is absurd. I also frequent typophile and these are not the sentiments or
the characteristics I've seen.

Technically clueless? The entire disciple is technical by nature. People use
and create their own tools as a matter of course, Python being the more
popular language because of the RoboFab library.

No one has a problem with "losing control" of the work they created, they just
want to be compensated for it like a reasonable human being.

~~~
thwarted
_No one has a problem with "losing control" of the work they created, they
just want to be compensated for it like a reasonable human being._

This would seem to be contradicting itself. If you accept that control will be
lost, then how can you accept that you'll be able to control that people will
compensate you?

And I'd venture to say that if you're unable to recognize that piracy is a
social problem that does not have a technical solution, then you may qualify
for being technically clueless in the context huhtenberg is talking about.

There needs to be "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem Response"
document for DRM implementation attempts.

~~~
tptacek
You're way outside the debate here. Commercial typeface vendors are going to
get compensated one way or the other. There's no DRM on a JPG from Getty or
Corbis, but you'd be made of stupid to steal a commercial stock photo for your
promotional material.

~~~
thwarted
Yes, and commercial vendors get compensated one way or another because they
use social tools, the law, to enforce their law-provided control over their
product. Typeface vendors are welcome to do that too, using the law and not
putting their trust in DRM, which is breakable, to enforce their control.

However, complaining that people who make their own product freely available,
for whatever reason (be it for demo, ideological, political, etc purposes), is
taking away compensation from those who don't make their product freely
available doesn't help the cause to get people to pay for things, or their
equivalents, they can otherwise get for free. Adobe charges high prices for
their tools because they can, and people will pay because it is considered
there are no better tools, free or otherwise. People pay for stock photos
because it's actually easier and often cheaper to do so rather than risk
having to deal with being caught not paying. Trying to convince the engineers
who control the format to add DRM bits, which is what the OP was responding
to, is exactly the wrong way to go about maintaining control and is a losing
battle.

~~~
zcrar70
> Typeface vendors are welcome to do that too, using the law

That's almost completely impractical. How would you find out when someone
steals your typeface?

Image libraries and photo agencies face a similar problem (I used to work for
one.)

~~~
misuba
How are you going to hide a @fontface call in your CSS file?

~~~
tptacek
It's just a filename. It can be anything.

~~~
m_eiman
.. but it'll still be the same file. With checksums and binary diffs, not a
big problem. There's even a business opportunity there!

------
AndrewO
I recently gained the same sentiment for different reasons. I decided to do
(what I thought was) the right thing and buy a font directly from ITC. I chose
the Mac option, being that I'm on a Mac.

Much to my surprise, the download arrives compressed as a Stuffit Expander
file. SERIOUSLY? Looking at the FAQ they say they Stuffit Expander is the
default compression format for Macs and is distributed with every Mac browser.
When was the last time they bothered to check that? I can barely remember the
last time I had Stuffit installed on my Mac and I've worked closely with 6
machines since 1999 (I seem to remember having it with 10.2 around 2003, but
that may be wrong).

So, yes, fuck 'em. When Mark said, "They still think they’re in the business
of shuffling little bits of metal around", it rang true for me.

------
there
the permission table he is talking about sounds like the copy-prevention bit
in PDFs. it's up to the reader software to enforce it, and since PDF is mostly
an "open" specification, many free readers simply ignore it or allow the user
to override it.

but how are fonts any different than stock images? a designer/photographer
creates a work, then licenses it to end users that are entitled to use it. if
you have a license to a stock image, you can use it on your website. i can
copy it and use it on my site, but that would be illegal. how is this
different than fonts? if you have a license to use a font, use it. i can copy
it and use it on my site, but that would be illegal.

sites using stock images illegally are often sued or fined and there are a
number of companies that offer services to find these illegally used images,
even ones that have been resized or altered.

with fonts it seems like it would be even easier to automate the process of
crawling websites looking for a particular font file and checking the
licensing of it, especially since the font files wouldn't be altered.

~~~
eli
It's doubly tricky with fonts because typefaces have a complicated legal
status. Typeface designs cannot be copyrighted, though individual
implementations (i.e. ttf files) can be.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface#Legal_aspects>

~~~
wmf
Yeah, maybe if we fixed the law to make typefaces explicitly copyrightable the
designers would turn their paranoia down a little.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
I'm not convinced that this is something that needs "fixing."

~~~
wmf
Why? Do you believe that fonts are not creative works? Would copyrightability
of fonts hurt anyone?

~~~
mkyc
The question you want to be asking is if it will help anyone. The response to
yours is yes, thousands of people. Google for anti-copyright for readings.

~~~
wmf
I'm familiar with the anti-copyright arguments, but my point was that it seems
inconsistent to have copyright on so many types of creative works except
typefaces.

~~~
Silhouette
So what happens when some big corporation has managed to lawyer their way to
copyright over pretty much all basic font designs, and anything remotely
sensible is close enough to be considered a derivative work? Now no-one can
use _writing_ to communicate. There is no sane universe in which a tax on
writing is in the interests of society.

Font files, as in the programs that describe the shape of a font in vector or
bitmap terms, are already copyrightable, but I think the US gets this one
absolutely right by specifically excluding font designs from being
monopolised.

~~~
wmf
If you're so cynical that you think someone could successfully claim copyright
over stuff that's hundreds of years old, I think it's pointless to argue with
you.

~~~
Silhouette
There are musical works that have been under copyright for longer than the
average human lifetime. In most places, singing "Happy Birthday" to a child in
the street is an infringement of copyright. Amazon successfully patented "one
click". Other people have patented inventions that contradict the laws of
physics as we know them. Mike Rowe got harassed by one of the largest and most
recognisable brands in the world for making a joke out of the similarity
between his name and theirs.

If you're so deluded as to think that common sense always works in the area of
intellectual property law, I think it's pointless to argue with you.

------
briansmith
This is at least partially a reaction to the Linux community's tricks to get
fonts. Some people in the Linux community wrote a program to automatically
download and install Microsoft's TrueType Font Collection fonts after
installation. That way, Linux can use all the fonts that Microsoft spent
millions of dollars designing, Linux itself isn't affected by the fonts'
license, nobody in the Linux community has to spend resources to design decent
fonts, and the user isn't hassled much.

All the font foundries saw that and said "we will never allow that to happen
again"--especially since the intersection between their customers and Linux
users is nearly the empty set. Their proposed solution is to allow embedding
only if the font files on the servers are covered by the DMCA. That is why
there is a trivial obsfucation of the font information in the EOT
specification. If somebody distributes a program to scrape a bunch of fonts of
the web and install them onto a person's computer, they can use the DMCA to
take the program down (just as the movie industry did with DeCSS). It isn't
100% effective, but it _does_ help prevent casual piracy. The copy-protection
bits of EOT are a lost cause in the long run. But, they will be somewhat
effective in the short run. That is just like DeCSS--the first couple of
years, it was difficult for an inexperienced user to find a trustworthy DeCSS
program with a usable interface.

I support EOT because Microsoft already made it the de-facto standard in 1997,
and Microsoft already said they won't implement TTF linking in IE. That means
that if other browsers don't implement EOT, we will always have the hassle of
having separate font files for IE and other browsers. That is silly. It is the
other browsers' fault that they have been so lethargic to implement font
linking. Now, 12 years later they finally implement it, but in an incompatible
way. Then they turn around and blame Microsoft for having a 12-year-old
implementation that is incompatible with their nubile mechanism. Who wins at
that game? Only people who value smugness over productivity.

~~~
jbert
> This is at least partially a reaction to the Linux community's tricks to get
> fonts. Some people in the Linux community wrote a program to automatically
> download and install Microsoft's TrueType Font Collection fonts after
> installation.

This is true, but perhaps misleading since it misses an important point.

The font downloader is legal according to the licensing terms:

[http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web#c...](http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web#cite_note-1)

Even if there were super-effective bits embedded in the font which magically
enforced the licensing terms it would still have been allowed.

~~~
briansmith
Correct. I'm not saying the Linux people did anything illegal or wrong since
Microsoft donated those fonts to the web community.

------
harpastum
I hadn't heard of the Open Font Library[1] before. It looks extremely
interesting, especially using dynamic font linking with @font-face[2].

[1]<http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/>

[2][http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_@font-...](http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_@font-
face?ccm=/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_@font-face)

~~~
GHFigs
Their purpose is undermined by the fact that they don't even use @font-face on
their own site. The could have and should have, given that the first specified
face in the stylesheet is "Nimbus Sans", a free font.

What I actually see on visiting Open Font Library is the headline "Typefaces
we can all share" in Helvetica Neue, a typeface that in fact we cannot all
share.

------
marcusbooster
1\. Typefaces take a long time to develop - design, create, package. The
process can take years.

2\. Typefaces have a value. If they didn't people would be content just using
Arial.

3\. People that do this work should be compensated.

4\. Trying to figure out a solution to this problem, both from a customers and
creators view is more beneficial than the "fuck this, fuck that" rhetoric in
the blog post.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
1\. Operating Systems take a long time to develop. The process can take years.

2\. Operating Systems have a value. If they didn't people would be content
just using punch cards.

3\. People that do this work should be compensated.

4\. Trying to figure out a solution to this problem, both from a customers and
creators view is more beneficial than the "fuck this, fuck that" rhetoric
among linux nerds.

I apologize for the snark. My point is that there's a striking similarity
here. There are some arguments that Windows is superior to Linux, and once
upon a time, those arguments might've been valid. They're not any more. It's
crazy these days to plunk down $300 for Vista when Ubuntu is better, and free
in every way.

Quantity leads to quality—even if the average free font is much worse than the
average proprietary font, a few of them will be very good, and will gain a lot
of usage.

There may still be a place for proprietary fonts. But the web will embrace the
more open option. If the foundries want a piece of that action, they're going
to have to change the way they do things.

~~~
tptacek
In the contest between Windows and Ubuntu, _almost everybody_ chooses Windows
(a small minority chooses Windows non-free competitor OS X). This fact is
inconvenient to your argument.

~~~
pingswept
Is the worldwide deployment of Vista comparable to the aggregate of the top 10
desktop Linux distributions?

I don't know those numbers, but I think that's the important question (rather
than just Windows vs. Ubuntu).

~~~
Silhouette
I would imagine that the total worldwide number of desktop Linux installations
is statistically insignificant. Vista has never really taken hold, and XP is
still the dominant OS by some way, but I've never seen a study that put
desktop Linux even on the same order of magnitude as OS X.

~~~
ableal
If you look at the links posted above, the w3schools.com numbers, 4% and 6%,
are not even a _binary_ order of magnitude apart, never mind the usually meant
decimal (10x spread).

The w3counter.com numbers are 2% and 5%. Both single digits (hint).

There are whole companies out there doing engineering work on Linux, except
for a few odd laptops. Actually, site http proxies may cause Unix web
undercount (i.e. stats are dominated by home access, presumably with lower
Unix use).

~~~
Silhouette
Do you seriously believe that the visitors to a site like w3schools.com are
even close to representative of the population as a whole?

There are indeed whole companies out there doing engineering work on Linux;
I've worked with some of them. But they are a tiny fraction of all companies,
and the desktops in most companies run Windows. Of those that don't, I'm sure
Linux has had a few big successes, but Apple sells all those computers to
someone. As I said, I've never seen a study that puts Linux even close. If
you've got more up-to-date information that is actually representative, go
ahead and share it, but please don't pretend that the server log from a random
web site is a real study.

------
misuba
Maybe someone should take a tip from the scientists and game developers behind
Fold It!, the protein folding "game," and create a simple Flash web game that
lets players hint and kern open fonts a letter at a time.

~~~
tdonia
<http://vimeo.com/3177481>

something similar to this iphone app, perchance?

~~~
misuba
Ah, I forgot about that. Cute, but we of course need a slightly less gamey,
more contemplative play experience for this problem.

------
tptacek
Open source fonts won't be crappy for long once they're easily usable by
everyone's browser.

~~~
briansmith
That's basically the same as the "this is the year of Linux on the desktop"
argument. I won't hold my breath. Open source end-user products always seem to
improve at a snails pace.

~~~
madair
The difference is that it takes one good typographer to create a font. It
takes a whole high school to keep Gnome screwed up.

~~~
blasdel
Whereas it only takes a single class of scandanavian middle-schoolers to keep
KDE thoroughly mediocre!

~~~
inimino
Is this the level of discourse to which Hacker News has now sunk? I expected
better.

------
tezza
Mark

====

wow. What an overreaction from Mark Pilgrim[1]. While sound & fury may grab
eyeballs, he is ignoring solutions already in front of his face[2].

 _The Solution_

==============

I worked with fonts and licensing all the time in a previous job, generating
automated artwork. The big thing missing in Open Source [his 'usable'] fonts
is kerning and hinting.

There is nothing stopping someone setting up a Kern-or-Not? website where web
people vote on which kerning values look best, and incorporating that data set
into an OSS font foundry[3].

I already did some of this myself to kern HTML using spans with negative
margins. To get excellent results you only need a few key characters [in
English]. I used Web fonts, but made up the kerning offsets by trial and
error. There is nothing stopping other people doing the same [see 2].

'T', 'W' are the big offenders. You can get excellent results concentrating on
these and all the vowels.

T e , T o , T y , T i , T e, W * etc. This is not exhaustive.

\-------------------------

[1] I came across his emails all the time when I was working on the OSS
Greasemonkey in the early days of its development. He threatened the lead dev
with 'forking the project and working on it until the day I die' if the
project did not take a direction he wanted. I believe it was another of one of
the fequent LGPL/GPL arguments that whirlwind in many OSS projects. The
mailing list greasemonkey-[user|dev] doesn't seem to include such old emails
[c 2005], so no link, sorry.

[2] Mark seems to prefer that other people fix the problems under his
guidance.

[3] May I suggest Public Domain for the dataset to avoid horrendous license
choice debates?

~~~
jacobolus
He said he'd fork greasemonkey & maintain it if the official greasemonkey
started informing websites of its presence(which would presumably allow them
to target different content at greasemonkey users, or try to circumvent it,
etc.). I hardly think that's an unreasonable position.

~~~
tezza
I haven't been around other projects when someone threatened to fork it 'until
the day I die', so I don't know how the tone comes across then.

The context was general discussion of architectural / license issues. It
seemed at the time like Mark went for the Nuclear [fork] option very, very
early on in the discussion. I can only imagine what it felt like for the lead
devs, but it cannot have been good. Unreasonable - borderline; rude,
counterproductive - yes.

This is all from my memory in 2005, without list logs to refresh.

------
diN0bot
the cursive font on diveintomark is virtually unreadable to me without
magnifying it a whole bunch. :(

edit: not cursive. narrow letter spacing. bold, too? gah my eyes.

~~~
tptacek
That's Gill Sans, one of the all-time greatest italic sans faces. See? He's
right. The foundries are doomed. =)

~~~
briansmith
It might be great in print but it is horrible on-screen. Generally italic
faces should be avoided on the web whenever possible. Failing that, it is much
better to use one that was designed specifically for on-screen use, like one
of the Microsoft C* fonts.

------
lsb
Personally, I think it'd be awesome to have something like Yahoo Pipes, but
for MetaFont.

------
danbmil99
I had no idea such an industry existed. I thought fonts were either handed
down by God, or invented by Martha Stewart in her spare time.

Does anyone really give a crap about this?

------
TweedHeads
Professional Fonts for 99cts coming soon!

Only at the AppStore

~~~
Silhouette
I realise that was meant to be a joke, but that's exactly the sort of dramatic
shift in sales and marketing tactics that might keep the major foundries
relevant.

Look at how many people have their own blog, or MySpace page, or otherwise
have created a little world of their own design on the Web.

Look at how successful iTunes and the like have been in selling music
conveniently, reliably, and at a price that doesn't make someone who wants
that music think twice and look for a free but illegal copy elsewhere.

I don't think selling fonts very cheaply via these sorts of channels and/or
partnering deals with the major social networking/blog services is such a
crazy idea. Different, yes. Unknown, sure. But not crazy.

