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I like Matthew Butterick’s approach. He sells whole families at a time (on a pay-once basis), offers discounts if you get the whole library, and the license is short, to the point, and reasonable: https://mbtype.com/license/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the recommendation. That's truly a no bullshit licensing approach. Wish everyone would do it that way.
I love that the license includes the phrase “internet randos”.
I don’t know why exactly, I think because it indicates a type of disconnected user that is hard to otherwise describe.
The silliest thing I learned years ago was that the license only applies to the "software" of the font. In the US, you can literally go and vectorize any font in the world and do whatever you want with it. "In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright, though the shapes may be protected by design patent (although these are rarely applied for, the first US design patent ever awarded was…
> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses Has Oracle disappeared? The article is kind of true though, especially when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers, the licence often make it not worth it if you're not a company. There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money".
I'm not in that kind of world so I'm not familiar with Oracle business practices. And I agree, there's usually no middle ground and it's both annoying and bizarre.
> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses Has Oracle disappeared? The article is kind of true though, especially when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers, the licence often make it not worth it if you're not a company. There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money".
Oracle will sell you a perpetual license that you own forever. Most foundries won't do that for fonts (at least for web).
Fonts still being able to make money makes me think that all this AI art generation probably won't put artists out of a job. Surely we have enough fonts at this point to be a 'solved' problem, and yet somehow people keep paying for it.
Purchasing a font license for a personal website is an insane and sadistic extravagance, like pissing away $200 on a t-shirt.
Buying a font ought to be on par with buying stock art. No necessary but if it makes you feel good, go for it.
It's more an artisanal world than a professional one, hence the craziness of some of the licensing schemes.
Fonts are made and sold more like how the music world would be if music wasn't mainstream.
I like Matthew Butterick’s approach. He sells whole families at a time (on a pay-once basis), offers discounts if you get the whole library, and the license is short, to the point, and reasonable: https://mbtype.com/license/
Article 8: "[...] the webfonts (= WOFF2 files) can be used on up to three websites owned by the license buyer. [...] read–write copies of my fonts can be embedded in word-processing documents that will be shared with fewer than 20 people."
Now some font license is expecting me to keep track of how many people a document gets shared with? Dystopian. What if I print it? Why is that allowed, but a digital file is not? How does that mesh with "Licensed users can use my fonts in any way they like"?
Also what does it even mean with a read-only format? Every file format can be ripped and converted, even if there is no widely known tooling to do so. A read-only format is not a thing that is possible. You can always just take some screenshots, or use a scanner, and reconstruct the font.
Purchasing a font license for a personal website is an insane and sadistic extravagance, like pissing away $200 on a t-shirt.
If you need your personal site to have the same quality as Apple's home page, then it's like spending $200 on a suit jacket.
> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses. Oh, if only that were true.