Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A rant on web font licenses

manuelmoreale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 169 posts

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#91

Post by beefield »

warpspin wrote: post #5
nathell wrote: post #2

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/

Thanks for the recommendation. That's truly a no bullshit licensing approach. Wish everyone would do it that way.

I guess we have different opinions what "no bullshit" means. This is what I consider no bullshit license:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

And yes, I also wish everyone used this license everywhere.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#92

Post by bombcar »

browningstreet wrote: post #27
Plasmoid wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying a font ought to be on par with buying stock art. No necessary but if it makes you feel good, go for it.

Not a defense, but few outside fonts understand how hard fonts are to make, and to maintain, and to expand against feature-sets. 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.

As an outsider, can you give an estimate on what it would cost to have a font designed from the ground up, and get full rights to all the files?

Are we talking $25k, $250k, $2.5m?

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#93

Post by ghaff »

jacobr1 wrote: post #78
a4isms wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money". This is a general problem in many businesses. Back in the early days of blogging, Joel Spolsky wrote an entire article about how there was basically no software that cost more than $1,000 and less than $75,000. This was more than a decade ago, the numbers today would be different because we care about LTV not sticker price, but…

Part of the problem is that selling to small/medium business sucks, unless you can make it very transactional (the cheap model above, just scaled per-seat). Anything that needs to be hands on costs you almost as much in labor costs as big company ... without the high-price point to justify it. And especially in medium business range they often actually need _more_ support, since they are complex enough to have integr…

Yeah, SMB has to be partner-led. They're often specialists (geography, vertical, etc.) That don't have the BigCo overhead that enabled BigCo to build the product in the first place. Partners are a huge part of selling for most B2B hardware and software companies. 50% or more of sales is not uncommon.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#94

Post by a4isms »

ghaff wrote: post #85
a4isms wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money". This is a general problem in many businesses. Back in the early days of blogging, Joel Spolsky wrote an entire article about how there was basically no software that cost more than $1,000 and less than $75,000. This was more than a decade ago, the numbers today would be different because we care about LTV not sticker price, but…

You see these kind of dynamics with a number of things. Years ago, Philip Greenspun wrote a post noting that there was no real middle ground between a magazine article and a book. (This was in the context of the web maybe addressing this--though it mostly hasn't, longreads and things like that aside). Something either fits into low single-digit thousands words length or it needs to be a 250+ page book. In some ways,…

As an author from time to time, I am keenly sensitive to the dynamic where so many books could have been a single essay, but there's no money in essays.

Unless you have something to sell, and presto, so many essays and blog posts are really advertisements for the author or their employer.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#95

Post by hunter2_ »

anononaut wrote: post #81
paxys wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true but you are discounting how hard it is to create your own font from scratch. If one could do it, they probably wouldn't be in the market for a font license in the first place. The vast majority of website builders want/need a 1-click solution. Kinda like saying hey, every SaaS service out there can legally be rebuilt in-house with the same look and behavior, so why pay for any of them?

Seems to me like it wouldn't be that difficult to automate vectorizing whatever ttf.

But fonts are more than just typeface vectors. For example, it's code can cause any conceivable string of characters to look different than simply rendering each glyph immediately next to each other; sometimes it's kerning tweaks, sometimes combinations get replaced with completely different glyphs (like "f" and "i" next to each other often having an undotted "i": look closely at "fi" depending on the font).

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#96

Post by agos »

I was in the market for something like that recently and had similar thoughts. It also introduces a lot of fear in the buying process (will I end up paying more for the fonts than I do for bandwidth if my project has moderate success?)

I think suggestions for reasonably priced fonts would be very welcome in this thread

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#97

Post by pc86 »

oldstrangers wrote: post #47
torstenvl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAIPL but IAAL and I'm skeptical of this, at least in the U.S. There's nothing in title 17 AFAIK that explicitly allows this, and it is quite different from how copyright works for all other categories of works. I'd be interested in a citation if you have one. Do you think you could vectorize all the pages in a book and magically get around the copyright? EDIT: Thank you for providing the citation. Interesting! I'm…

"Do you think you could vectorize all the pages in a book and magically get around the copyright?" ...what? The specific shapes and style of a font are not protected under copyright. It's only the software. "A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes…

OK so you vectorize some commercial font then release it for free. Haven't you essentially just recreated the software, which is copyrighted? Haven't you still violated copyright just with extra steps?

It seems like a distinction without a difference.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#98

Post by makeitdouble »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #67
lozenge wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't missing, it was slow. Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? If you want to avoid that then you have to wait.

> Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? It makes me angry that this is even a sentence. Call me an old fart but I really felt that the web lost the thread when this became a concern. Websites shouldn't be magazines. Typography and layouts are nice to have, but the first priority should be information and content. But then the marketing people got involved and it had to become part of…

> Websites shouldn't be magazines.

Why though? We’re in 2023 and magazines got out of print to move to the web. Telling literal magazines “no, you shouldn’t exist here” is pretty harsh.

But I’ll grant you the mental image is powerful. I imagine you going to a restaurant and shouting “what’s with the decorum ? And that background music ? and all this space between tables ? this should be a warehouse with everyone sitting on the floor with the lasagna served in tupperwares ”

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#99

Post by manuelmoreale »

oldstrangers wrote: post #80
paxys wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true but you are discounting how hard it is to create your own font from scratch. If one could do it, they probably wouldn't be in the market for a font license in the first place. The vast majority of website builders want/need a 1-click solution. Kinda like saying hey, every SaaS service out there can legally be rebuilt in-house with the same look and behavior, so why pay for any of them?

I'm not arguing for creating your own font. I'm just expressing how silly the law is. Of all the things I thought a copyright law would protect, I'd assume it would be the actual artistic visualization of a font, and not the software that it runs on.

I might be wrong but I think the issue is that there are typeface extremely similar to each other and so it would be hard to figure out when something is actually a new design.

Arial/Helvetica is the classic example.

Personally, I wouldn’t even know how to approach this issue from a legal standpoint.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#100

Post by btown »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #24
conradfr wrote: post #4

> 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".

> Has Oracle disappeared? 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.

I'll never pass up an opportunity to post Bryan Cantrill's epic Oracle Lawnmower rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s
Post reply on HN