As a fan of good type, I'm curious as to why more designers and foundries haven't thought about moving to desktop licensing models that go beyond the traditional "x number of users can use the font in any sort of project and the cost goes up as x increases."
Obviously, it's impossible to make a living from free/libre fonts, so unless somebody with deep pockets comissions one, that's out as a model, but what about, say, use based licensing: home/hobbyist users pay less than people looking to use the font in commercial projects. Enforcement could be tricky, but I can think of a couple things that would help. The non-commercial version could potentially be named differently ("NC" or "Home" could be appended to the name). Also, the non-commercial edition could be shipped only as a TTF, which would make it unsuitable for use with large-scale printing.
Has anyond tried this? Was it unsuccessful? Or is the home market simply too small to be worth spending time on?
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I used to offer student/non-commercial licenses through MyFonts. I noticed that most of the people buying them were graphic design studios in wealthy European nations—mostly Switzerland—who were too cheap to pay full price.
TTF fonts work just fine for offeset printing.
So basically, people are were dishonest and cheating was rife. How sad.
@ Ray:
I've noticed that you seem to offer desktop use of most of your fonts for free and only charge for web and ebook use. Isn't that a form of alternative licensing based on prospective end use, even if the criteria are a little different than a simple commercial/noncommercial split?
Impallari is doing alright with it. Vernon Adams was before his accident. Most people who release libre fonts because I show up having already organised the funding don't try to do it themselves, they just take the money and treat it like any other job.
Also: Custom type owned by the client is libre type, usually overlooked
Ray, thanks for your insights here. I figure that you might be the most prolific designer who has attempted to make fonts graits for personal use and somehow upselling them; its interesting to hear that you had little luck upselling personal use licenses. When you say,
Do you still see sales for commercial licenses upsold from the gratis fonts you published in the 90s/00s?
The problem I recently had was just getting the free fonts out there. It could be a matter of my new fonts not being good enough, but some of the old ones that earn the most in upsold licenses, are inarguably terrible. My guess is that these days, people don't hunt for free fonts the way they used to. If you're reading this and you're under 20, try to imagine a time when people bought computers and they didn't have enough fonts. I'm not talking about design professionals, I mean your average person. If you wanted something other than the small selection of OS fonts, you had to go get some. Now, when you install Windows 8, you get a cornucopia of wonderful fonts.
Free font web sites had 4-5 new fonts per week and most of them umm... here:
http://www.fontspace.com/timeline/1996
http://www.fontspace.com/timeline/2014
The font gold rush will never occur again. There will never be a situation where there's a lack of good free fonts; at least not with this alphabet.
This is a puzzling myth, similar to the one that TTF fonts somehow "have" a UPM size of 2048 (while in fact 98% have a UPM size of 1000).