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If they pick a font, even an open source one, it could encourage people to copy them. Or be making some (very minor) statement about open source. By developing their own font, they don't set preference for any organization, group, or business.
They do develop it on GitHub, which I would consider to be a stronger statement than font choice.
What is the advantage of this over Open Sans? Is it less encumbered legally? Or are there other advantages? Or is it simply another alternative, which is also great.
Yes, Open Sans is under the Apache License while Public Sans should be under Public Domain (although this is a bit unclear and is being debated in the github issues).
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Yup. I run Federalist at 18F and absolutely love the work, the challenge and colleagues. We do everything in the open, so feel free to follow our work here: https://github.com/18F/federalist We also implement the USWDS, which you can follow here: https://github.com/18F/federalist-uswds-jekyll Let me know if you have any questions!
>> Let me know if you have any questions! If this is meant for web sites, I have a question and I ask this on HN a lot. Why does the government need to provide ANY fonts? I have a real problem with websites pushing their own fonts on users. I don't think it's their place. Users should select their preferred font in their own browser. Why would a US government site feel the need to use particular fonts? If this is for…
Does this negatively affect your experience? Can't you override fonts if you want to?
Edit: note, I'm not the person the question was directed at, and have no connection to the federalist project at all.
Is it legal for the federal government to specify a font license other than “This is released into the public domain”? They automatically give up all copyright upon publication, which ought to exhaust any licensing terms.
How is the USWDS specifying a font license? It's a derivative work, so the license comes from upstream.
My idea is being hashed out on their GitHub, though sadly I suspect they’ll need lawyers to advise them rather than HN commenters such as I: https://github.com/uswds/public-sans/issues/30
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I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a public-facing government website. It ought to degrade gracefully in order to reach the broadest possible audience. Or, write a decent site to start with, and you wouldn't have to worry about degrading. The entire page is nothing but a shell for a web app written in JavaScript that doesn't need to be a web app written entirely in JavaScript.
> It ought to degrade gracefully in order to reach the broadest possible audience. You mean under 1% of users that intentionally broke their browser? Seems unreasonable to dedicate resources to that, that could be better spent on 99% of our users. Why should the 1% get special treatment? And what other parts of their browser can they disable that we need to support, perhaps no CSS? Maybe IE5? Maybe they only render X…
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IANAL, I believe the whole idea behind GPL is to make sure GPL supersede what you might claim otherwise. So if the federal government can possibly make a derived work into public domain (or crown copyright if UK) instead of GPL, that's a loophole in GPL! (I know this work is not GPL, but similar idea applies)
I imagine just the government's code contributions would be public domain, and public domain code should be GPL compatible.
This is so interesting. These modern sites clash really hard with my mental visual of "Government technology." And it led me to this, which is maybe even more interesting: https://federalist.18f.gov/
The USDS (US Digital Service) was born in the fire of the healthcare.gov fiasco, and several industry veterans from Google stepped in to fix the infrastructure issues they saw within the US Government. Currently, @Matt_Cutts is leading the org. I can only think that your comment brings a smile to his face.
Hit me up if you're interested in getting into this space!