davelab6 wrote:
2008/5/25 Pierre Marchand <capparis@free.fr>:
> Vous (Dave Crossland) avez écrit :
>> 2008/5/24 Peter Nermander <peter@nermander.se>:
>> > I wish fonts would be licensed the same way for example photographs
>>
>> But fonts are functional software, and photos are typically decorative
>> artwork.
And photos take only seconds or minutes to produce, while fonts take months or years.
>
> a rather long discussion with the need of a lot of wine, etc.
lol - that is indeed what this is :-)
> So, I don't think that glyphs should be licensed as photos because they are
> not just artwork, I don't think either that they can be treated as plain
> software, nor double licensed! So, I don't know exactly,
I believe that since fonts are software, and since type designs are
functional - a type design you can't read with is non-functional -
then they ought to be free in the same way as program software is, and
functional information like encyclopedias is too. The "glyphs are art"
reasoning is at best a misunderstanding of design as art, and at worse
a sneaky way for proprietary software developers to justify DRM.
So if function is all that matters, noone would need more tha Courier /
Times / Helvetica surely? Those are quite readable.
IMO a font designer has the right to profit from his/her work, and as long as
one needs money for living, the font designer should decide how to pay for
the use of his/her work.
/Andreas
