Best Of

Dave, a couple of points:

1. When I referred to 'Dave and co' I was talking about the impression left by comments made in this thread by you, Vernon and, to a lesser extent, Pablo. I wasn't talking about ' the folks at Google who actually decide these things'; indeed, I'm not talking about the GF font collection, 99% of which I've not even looked at (I don't actually pay much attention to contemporary Latin type design). I wasn't aware of Fjord One or Crimson Text before this thread, and I'm not very interested in debating whether X font looks too much like Y font. That said, I do think Fedra Serif is a good example of what I spoke about in my last post: a recent design with a strong individual flavour, such that a good number of people are bound to be uncomfortable with something as similar as Fjord. [As a general principle, I think any company should be wary of student projects, because almost everything a beginner designer does is likely to be too derivative for comfort (mine certainly were). Students tend to be very focused on contemporary design, especially today thanks to social media, and to spend too much time looking at what fashionable foundries are producing. The results can be very useful as learning exercises, but most should be buried after graduation. The best student projects that do go on to be released tend to be ones that have been worked on for a number of years after graduation.]

2. I don't think there's anything of 'cartel behaviour' in what I described as professional courtesy. A cartel is a deliberate agreement between competitors to limit and control competition (à la the old ATypI code morale, which I was instrumental in having removed from the association statutes in 2004). If I were to say to colleague X, 'I won't sell anything similar to your typeface Y for fifteen years if you don't sell anything similar to my typeface Z', then that would be something like a cartel agreement. I'm talking about having respect for another individual's creative work as a matter of personal ethics. You asked me earlier if I thought pricing should be based on 'normal market mechanisms' or if there were 'something moral involved'. There's always something moral involved, and normal market mechanisms don't make that go away, they just relegate it; indeed, historically, there's nothing normal about market mechanisms (cf. studies by anthropologists studying non-market economies; to my mind, some of the most interesting and important academic work being done today). You also asked me whether I was still sympathetic to the utopian goals of free software. Yes, insofar as these goals resemble more a human economy than a market one. But as I've said to you numerous times over the years, I think trying to enact those goals within the context of corporate capitalism is just inviting exploitation of individual creative producers by the owners of capital, who are able to leverage massively more value from creative works than the individual creator. I might point to the regretably small 'bounties' that GF has reportedly paid for some font 'freedom' as an example of such exploitation (and I'm unimpressed, in this regard, by statements from some of those designers that they're satisfied with the amounts; where's their analysis of the value Google derives from the fonts that would determine whether the bounty is proportionate, fair or exploitative?).