Two thoughts about Google after Typographics

PabloImpallari said:

Richard, IIRC that fix was done before being published, so there was no need for substitution. Dave have lots of automatic test for that sort of technical stuff that are run before publication.

Thierry Blancpain said:

@ybaggar: Totally respect your opinion of intensely disagreeing with Google Fonts, but asking trollish questions (how much does it pay? oh that’s a job for idiots anyway) isn’t exactly what this forum should be about.

Yes, it was terribly harsh and I apologize for its seeming inappropriateness. I was bringing to it a certain knowledge that, on second thought, I realize is not widely understood. For the sake of clarity: the Concentration Camp Kapos were Jews who were kept alive to make some of the worst and most difficult decisions. They often tried valiantly to bring some semblance of justice to their "work," but of course there was no such thing as justice in their situation. They were nothing but shills in a deadly system.

Google is not a concentration camp. But neither can it be seen as benevolent, given its potential to kill competition, whether by design or inadvertently, simply by involving itself in an area or product that had hitherto been the product of an open market. Its path to growth, which is what its shareholders demand, is fraught with moral dilemmas given its vast size. I believe that Google Fonts, whatever good it does in the short term (such as in the non-Latin arena, as Hrant points out), it cannot be a good thing for type design in the long run. It sucks too much air out of the market and hurts competitors by forcing them to raise prices, to make up for lost sales.

Of all the people in the room, I am surely amongst the least affected by all this, but perhaps that gives me a little clearer perspective. If Google published only fonts of the highest quality and greatest breadth of features, and had to pay market value for them, I suspect their interest in the business would be significantly diminished. Dave's latest efforts looks like a runaround, a way to improve things without the kind of major investment Google could certainly afford to make if it believed it was all that important. Maybe a union could form to force their hand a bit. 

Nick Shinn said:

Is this a web font replay of bundling? Many years ago, I objected to the way that Adobe, Microsoft and Apple, etc., bundled free fonts with their big ticket items. I thought that was unfair, but perhaps in the long run it has served to educate and stimulate the market for fonts.

LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland said:

With Dave I had exchanges about Marx, Engels, and all those other guys in history who claimed that their opinions and actions would improve the world

SiDaniels said:

Are the Google fonts really open source, if there are no source files available? "Open Binary" maybe? ;-)