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A rant on web font licenses

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: A rant on web font licenses

#131

Post by mortenjorck »

Linked at the end of the article is something that I can't believe I haven't come across already (as a designer): https://www.fontshare.com

I initially assumed the author had linked it simply as a commercial type foundry with reasonable web licensing, but I did a double-take when I realized these were all free (beer rather than speech, thus distinct from the OFL community), in what appears to be a rather expansive freemium project from Indian Type Foundry.

While I'll have to spend some time using these to get a real sense of them (font quality often comes down to kerning pairs), my first impression is that these look absolutely top-tier, in the same league as both leading commercial type families and the best OFL projects.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#132

Post by kjs3 »

EmilyHughes wrote: post #65
ckdot2 wrote: post #12

In my opinion in most cases it's neither worth the price nor worth the effort to use paid fonts on a website. There's a huge amount of fonts for free on Google Fonts. Also, yoou are allowed to host them on your own server, so there's no privacy issue.

In Austria there was recently a case of a women sueing thousands of businesses for using google fonts on their website. The reasoning was that the fonts are hosted on google, so by visiting these sites they sent her IP to google without her knowing (what is meant is just the font download via the browser from google servers, nothing was actually "sent"). Apparently she visited these thousands of business websites one…

You can sue thousands of people in Austria and remain anonymous? No way is that ripe for abuse.../s

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#133

Post by kjs3 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #72
ckdot2 wrote: post #12

In my opinion in most cases it's neither worth the price nor worth the effort to use paid fonts on a website. There's a huge amount of fonts for free on Google Fonts. Also, yoou are allowed to host them on your own server, so there's no privacy issue.

Not only the privacy issue, but the point where Google decides to charge for fonts, or drop it completely, and your website suddenly gets ugly. I always download the font and serve it myself. Arguing with designers about fonts isn't fun. I totally understand how they want the pretty thing to fit in with their artistic vision, but the pain and cost of paid fonts is such a huge drag that I refuse to do it (especially i…

It has got heated in the past.

I have found "find a new web designer" to be one of the less difficult tasks to land in my backlog.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#134

Post by johnchristopher »

makeitdouble wrote: post #98
Pet_Ant wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sitt…

Then just put a PDF on the website and be done with it.

edit: and it seems we can't make magazines on the web anyway so there's also that.

edit 2: does the background music not loading/working prevents the cook from cooking and the waiter from bringing food ?

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#135

Post by garrickvanburen »

bombcar wrote: post #92
browningstreet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A decade ago, it was $25k for 1 weight.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#136

Post by Hizonner »

mschuster91 wrote: post #129
EmilyHughes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Austria there was recently a case of a women sueing thousands of businesses for using google fonts on their website. The reasoning was that the fonts are hosted on google, so by visiting these sites they sent her IP to google without her knowing (what is meant is just the font download via the browser from google servers, nothing was actually "sent"). Apparently she visited these thousands of business websites one…

We had the same shit in Germany. The lawyer and the crying-wolf frontman are facing a criminal investigation and police seized 346.000€ in December last year [1]. > what is meant is just the font download via the browser from google servers, nothing was actually "sent" Well, Google does get sent the IP address, and that is enough to be covered by GDPR regulation. While I do think it's important the GDPR gets respecte…

> there needs to be some distinction between actually legitimate "necessary for functioning" data processing which would include stuff such as Google Fonts

Downloaded fonts are not "necessary for functioning". Just use the system fonts.

Essentially no actual user cares AT ALL about the fonts on your Web site. If you're wasting time and energy on stuff like fonts, all you're doing is frustrating users by not putting that time and energy into anything actually valuable... while wasting every user's bandwidth.

Anyway, you have no control over what Google does with that IP address (or any associated cookies), and likely no reliable assurance that what Google does with the information is "necessary for functioning". I would expect Google to tie that download to every other download from that user's browser on every other site, and use the results for every possible purpose. If by some miracle Google doesn't do that, lots of the other third-party crap that sites embed will. Often the third party providers' descriptions of how their stuff work will be missing, incomplete, unintentionally wrong, intentionally misleading, or outright lies, so to have any real assurance you'd need to do some serious due diligence on every third party embed. Which nobody does, and which would defeat the "easy use" advantage of using those embeds to begin with.

Nearly all Web pages could load without a single connection to any server other than the one in the page URL. It's completely appropriate to treat every such connection as a disclosure of information to a third party... with all the regulatory requirements that should come with that... regardless of whether or not you've gotten used to making those connections without thinking about them. If it takes big fines to enforce that, well, I guess that's tough.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#137

Post by dsr_ »

tiffanyh wrote: post #77
dsr_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true. Now, completely without benchmarks, I can tell you that my workplace has migrated from Oracle to Postgresql and performance is essentially the same: a few things were a little faster on Oracle, a few a little faster on PG. All revenue is directly or indirectly dependent on the database systems, which have been continuous for 20+ years: this is not a side-project. PG administration is much, much faster. Sta…

Does your database run on NVMe storage? I ask because NVMe has neutralized a ton of performance differences across data related products.

It did in the last generation of Oracle and this generation of PG.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#138

Post by manuelmoreale »

CharlesW wrote: post #113
manuelmoreale wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know about DJR's Font of the Month Club. That's kinda neat. > That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok Why do you think that's ok if you don't mind me asking? I worked on sites that used to generate lots of views but made 0 money because were not designed to be commercial projects. Why should I pay more money for a…

It's just normal price segmentation as applied to a creative work. The idea is that Nestlé can and should pay more for a typeface to be part of the voice of a brand than, say, a family-run bakery.

That I get but there's literally an entire world in between a family-run bakery and Nestlé. And prices are right now completely idiotic for most normal businesses.

And also, even though I understand the overall concept, why should Nestlé pay more? I'm asking as a general concept.

Should a freelancer charge more money for the same amount of work to a large client just because they're a large client?

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#139

Post by Pet_Ant »

jstummbillig wrote: post #119
Pet_Ant wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you believe in an open web, there is no reasonable assumption that the stuff you value should receive any special consideration and all values should find the representation that people at large ascribe to them. It's entirely reasonable for someone else to value different stuff than you do. If a vendor breaks a things, it's entirely reasonable for the customer to be frustrated by that in every case, no matter the…

I think a better approach is to use the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) to create and force websites to provide the relevant information in a standardised and accessible formats. You can do what you want, but substance before style.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#140

Post by castillar76 »

kjs3 wrote: post #128
abruzzi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same line that made me scratch my head. I'm a non-network guy who has been stuck migrating our phone system from PRI to SIP, and every time I think I get it done, I have to buy another license from Cisco--that our resellers didn't tell us about at the beginning of the project. The latest issues is our voice gateways need a special security license to handle TLS. Outside that, cost per usage is one of the…

Yeah, Cisco licensing is (and always has been) 'complicated'. But a lot of that is because customers like to say things like "I'm not going to use that feature, why am I paying for it". So Cisco has 500 licensing options for everything to maximize the amount it can extract. Perverse incentives and all that. The other end of the spectrum is Microsoft that says "Here's what you get in an E3 license, take it or leave it…

> Yeah, Cisco licensing is (and always has been) ‘complicated’.

Some of this, too, is due to Cisco’s longevity in the market, the sheer number of product lines they’ve gone through, and the number of companies they’ve absorbed.

You buy a company, you can’t just cancel all the existing licenses for those products, so you have to keep those licensing systems and pricing packages around for those customers that keep renewing year after year. Only after a while, it becomes more trouble than it’s worth to integrate those into your existing licensing packages (especially if you’re figuring you’ll get around to EoLing that stuff when no one’s using it anymore), so they just stick around forever.

You kill off a product line and replace it with something, existing customers say, “Great, I’ll buy the new thing with the options I had on the old one”. Except those don’t map cleanly, so now you’re developing odd licensing packages for people who want the Super-Duper Routing 9000 but only with the same leather trim and manual shifter they had on the Routing 8000. If the customer is large enough you’ll bend for them, especially the big national ones with clauses in their contracts that require the forfeiture of dragon-blanching amounts of gold if you ever can’t sell them exactly what they bought last year.

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