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A rant on web font licenses

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: A rant on web font licenses

#161

Post by chihuahua »

kjs3 wrote: post #127
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".

when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers I can't get past thinking "why would you do that", especially for something you're having to pay for to use, and could break your web site if something goes wrong. That seems like the poster child for "hey, find an alternative, any alternative, that doesn't rely on a paid third party for something as trivial as how a header looks".

That's true. But also, it seems absurd to me that people care enough about fonts to pay money for them. To me, there are only 5 fonts in the world:

* any Serif font (Times, etc, they all look the same except for 1-pixel differences)

* any Sans serif font (Arial, Helvetica, it's all the same thing)

* Serif monospaced (Courier)

* Sans serif monospaced (Consolas etc)

* Silly unreadable fonts like Papyrus. Sure, technically, there are lots of these, and they do look different, but there's no reason to use one of these, unless you just want to make your site difficult to read.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#162

Post by chihuahua »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #44
manuelmoreale wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot better than most, that's for sure. But I still don't understand why they have all these arbitrary usage rules like the maximum of three websites. I look at fonts like tools. As a dev who also does design I should be able to buy it once and have it available as a tool at my disposal.

It's classic market segmentation. They'll be happy to let use the fonts for whatever you want but you'll have to pay more.

Market segmentation makes sense in principle. If Joes Bait & Tackle shop wants to use your font, it makes sense that Joe should pay less than Google. Unfortunately, for an intangible digital thing like a web font, coming up with a payment scheme leads to all kinds of absurdities.

That said, I think once you get to pre-paid expiring page views, that's a sign that we've entered the realm of insanity.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#164

Post by EmilyHughes »

Hizonner wrote: post #136
mschuster91 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

But it's the job of the government to enforce that via warnings and fines, not private entities sueing for "emotional damage".

The IP alone is almost useless anyway unless it can be tied to other information you've given up to google already - in which case you can't tell you are that cautious with your browsing to begin with.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#165

Post by bruce511 »

pwinnski wrote: post #148
bruce511 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human decency is not a legal construct. Licensing terms say you pay this, you get that. If you sell a font for $20 then you se it for $20,regardless of who or what buys it. Companies are under no obligation to pay more than what you are asking for. If you want more, then license it the way you want.

Right, so, this is why we can't have nice things. For a more gracious understanding of my comment, consider that I meant human decency might compel someone to honor the terms of the license, rather than abuse or ignore them. Relying solely on human decency would mean no auditing, no installed spyware, etc. That so few companies go this route suggests that despite having clear licenses, the humans involved aren't prac…

In that context, yes, I agree, you can't rely on human decency, you (often) need mechanisms in place to restrict use.

Apologies for misunderstanding your post. I read it in the context of "companies should offed to pay more because they can afford it." Which is not what you said.

Of course this isn't a company thing. (companies are often very pro-active about licensing.) Humans on the other hand are very good at ignoring the rules - just read pretty much any thread on Netflix.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#166

Post by johnchristopher »

makeitdouble wrote: post #157
johnchristopher wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

This gives me flashback of the Apple attempt at crack this nut. PDFs, PDFs everywhere. > edit 2: does the background music not loading/working prevents the cook from cooking and the waiter from bringing food ? The cook is busy fixing the Sonos system, your lasagna will have to wait.

> The cook is busy fixing the Sonos system, your lasagna will have to wait.

Oh but I have been out of that restaurant 5 minutes after I noticed nobody was doing anything related to food. They don't need to microwave the lasagna.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#167

Post by hakfoo »

Hizonner wrote: post #136
mschuster91 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Couldn't at least "icon fonts" like FontAwesome be necessary for meaningful functionality of some sites?

A site that's sprinkled with [FE30] placeholders where the designers expected icons isn't necessarily readable or usable.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#168

Post by spiralx »

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,…

A novella? A short story? Both of these are common enough that I find this particular example rather strange.

ETA: And now I see it's in the context of non-fiction, ignore this. But I remember seeing novella-sized non-fiction books around about a decade ago, they were just not that common.

Re: A rant on web font licenses

#169

Post by kjs3 »

castillar76 wrote: post #140
kjs3 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ren…

Of course.

If the customer is large enough you’ll bend for them

If the customer is large enough Cisco will produce a custom IOS build to your spec. Made some consulting gigs really interesting.

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