23 Oct 2000

Mon, 23 Oct 2000 18:37:26 GMT

Last Friday, I downloaded the fonts from http://fonts.linuxpower.org/.

Today, I started going through them. I've had to reject nearly 90% of them. Not because of quality - I haven't looked at a single one yet. Because of license.

I don't want any that I can't redistribute, because I don't know if I'll be distributing them - I give out accounts on this box like candy.

I can't take any that are for "non-commercial" use only, since I don't know if what I do is considered commercial (my personal web page, that I show to possible employers? Graphics for GPL projects?).

It's a parallel of what was on the WorldForge mailing lists last week - one of our musicians was uncomfortable with commercial use, but we were able to convince him that it was OK.

One thing that I stressed in my posting on the subject was that attribution would always be available - we were going to be very good about that. (My posting was not at all convincing to Adrian - I guess that wasn't the angle that mattered to him). But with these fonts, I'm throwing out the .txt files that accompany them, even though they're the only attribution available. One reason is that I will pretty much only be using them personally, and the only time you attribute fonts is in the "Colophon" section of books. But someone to whom I distribute them (not that I plan to do this in an organized fashion - the site above handles that) might. Also, I really don't care who created a font enough to look it up in a text file (which usually has a name that's like "read.me", so I would have to do tons of work to index them to the actual fonts).

At any rate, my laziness w.r.t. fonts has lead me to the following conclusion: All media must have author info embedded in it. MP3s do (I try to set my ID3s). There's no excuse for other stuff not to. People are otherwise too lazy to do attribution right. Throw in a Paypal ID, and you've got a street-performer mini-economy. I think this is mandatory.

Advogato blog for novalis

23 Oct 2000