[Foundation-l] Fonts

Thu Jul 21 22:29:04 UTC 2005

Yann Forget wrote:

>Le Thursday 21 July 2005 01:15, Dori a écrit :
>  
>
>>On 7/20/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>><snip>
>>
>>    
>>
>>>On previous wikimeets I attended we did discuss the need for a
>>>collection of fonts that would include as many fonts as we can get for
>>>our public. It would help a lot if we could have one resource that is
>>>free for use and that does include all the needed fonts. If it requires
>>>a reasonable amount of money to buy a missing font to make it Free, I
>>>think it is worthy of consideration. I am also sure that when we
>>>acknowledge the people who make fonts available for this purpose we will
>>>be able to get many resources for free.
>>>      
>>>
>>Good fonts require tons of time from professional artists. I don't
>>think the foundation could buy them for all languages we support
>>unless we somehow come across a few million dollars. We'd probably
>>have better luck convincing Microsoft to open source theirs.
>>    
>>
>
>You are joking, I hope ?
>I doubt very much Microsoft is going to release anything as Open source any 
>time soon. It is not in their interest.
>
>But I am pretty sure funding could be found to buy IP rights.
>Think about Blender: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)
>
Hoi,
Actually there are quite a few applications that have been made open 
source by Microsoft. They do use several licenses for this and they are 
not all equally Free or Open. My point is more that we should not assume 
what a company like Microsoft is. When we want something of them and 
when we do not ask nicely then we are not much better than what we make 
Microsoft out to be.

Yes, we could buy IP rights propably for the shareware fonts ..

I have started an article on Meta on this subject: [[Font support from 
the WikiMedia Foundation]]. This is to prevent the idea from going away 
.. :)

Thanks,
    Gerard