And your point is? As long as the design studio had a license for Prokyon, they can modify and use it as they like.

There was a brief discussion on the subject at LWN.net, but it was quickly dismissed:

Typefaces are not copyrightable. You can 'rip them off' all you feel like and it's completely and perfectly legal. There is a long history behind of this and it exists for good reason. (The modern concept of 'IP' is just flat-out insane.)

Now the actual scalable font _implementation_, the *.ttf file or whatever, would be copyrightable (for good reasons) (but not bitmap fonts, maybe ironically). As long as you made your own fonts from scratch you'd be fine. You can copy whatever typeface you want, but the actual font is something you'd have to make on your own.

http://lwn.net/Articles/377120/

The typeface used in the presented new Xubuntu logo is different from that in the new Ubuntu logo. The 't' and the 'n' are different. I guess they are still working on some things. This seems to be the modification of a Sans-Serif font to look like DTL Prokyon or Dax.

It is plagiarism (of an ugly typeface), but it will not have juridical consequences, especially not, if the judges have a sense of taste.

now i'm curious as to who this mysterious designers is, who is 'apparently one of the best font designers in the world'.

Apparently the secret is out now - yes, we're responsible for the design. And no, of course it's not plagiarized - like all of our custom designs it was drawn from scratch with no reference to any existing font.

While there are superficial and coincidental similarities between the handful of characters you've seen, the rhythm, proportions, and details are completely different between the two fonts.

Reports that this is not the final version of the logo are correct - the final version depends on the typeface currently in development - but this is a good indication of the direction in which we're heading.

David Marshall
Dalton Maag Ltd

We can discuss if making 'look alike' fonts is plagiarism or not. What is out of discussion is that it is not an original work. It is just playing (very little) around other people's ideas.

If FOSS folks want their Free Font Movement to take off, it's about time they start eating their own dogfood...

Gerstner Original, 1987

Sorry for missing your note of caution in my reply, Tim.
I agree Dax has popularized this style.
I think some of Unger's work hints in this direction too (Swift, Argo), but maybe that's just my eyes...

In a thread discussing Dax quite a few years ago Mike Yanega pointed out that the 'stemless' or 'spurless' style goes back at least to Bernhard Gothic, from 1930.

The reductionist approach had been going on since before World War I and is not news. It is just another way of looking at letterforms--fair game for use and abuse like any other construction. I began doing it in college in the 1960s and more recently, developed a family (yet to be released) in 2005 called "Dez Superego" I by no means claim to be the first. I also did not look at any other type when I was doing Superego so perhaps this is not such an impossible coincidence for Dalton Maag to have something similar as well?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dezcom/3157744858/in/set-72157611971349634/

I know there was a reference here not long ago to some free font being plagiarized from (can't find the reference now; not Hermes, but has some letters like its lowercase u) but that font looks very similar to DIN. If every sans-serif font which looks squarish but has rounded corners is plagiarism, design space will shrink.

Stephen's list include FF Signa, in which only the a and d are ‘spurless’. If this meets the criteria of selection, then Adobe's corporate Clean type may be added to the list.

A lot of the typefaces mentioned don't fit the category.
What we're talking about is a sub-genre of "pruned stem" where the standard join between vertical stem and curve is around 70˚- 80˚. So types with 0˚ or 90˚ joins don't count.
Neither do those where only the odd character has such a join.

It’s not piracy, but a genre. Sorry, but if this is a genre only, I prefer the honesty of pirates. Except from that I think, that Blackbeard would have kicked Prokyon and the whole genre over board.

@ Chris

I doubt, that the designer of the Ubuntu typeface does not have Prokyon stored on his harddisk and did not have a deep look into it in FontLab.

I doubt, that the designer of the Ubuntu typeface does not have Prokyon stored on his harddisk and did not have a deep look into it in FontLab.

Arno, is it really that difficult to believe that one could independently produce such letter shapes given even passing familiarity with the spurless look? I've looked at Prokyon only in passing a long time ago, but if someone asked me to draw a logo for Ubuntu in Prokyon's style, I would have no trouble producing these kinds of shapes. Even if I had never seen Prokyon but merely had some general exposure to other spurless sans serifs, it would be easy to duplicate them. They're really simple shapes!

As you can follow in the thread it isn't even easy to establish who came up with the idea first, probably because it's such a simple idea. All I know is that I see spurless sans serif faces everywhere; in advertisements in the Paris metro, for instance.

A few years ago I started designing a slab serif with a spurless look in some letters. I think I took the idea from the Perpetua 'd' and made it a recurring design feature. Then I posted it to the crit board here, and someone pointed out the striking similarities to FF Signa, which I hadn't seen before.

So I know from personal experience that the same set of simple design ideas can result in a typeface similar to an existing one even if one hasn't even seen the existing design. You can knock the failure to innovate, but you can't throw in accusations of piracy in those cases.

When I saw this thread I thought you were talking about Christian Robertson's Ubuntu titling font (open source). But it's clearly not.

http://betatype.com/node/36

Who is 'we all', Mr Hosny, and what 'community' are you talking about? Your insinuation that I am defending DM's work makes me smile.
If you had read my comment more carefully, Herr 'Enslin', you would have noticed that this is reflection on the notion of 'plagiarism', in response to Mr (quadibloc) Savard's remark. No idea what made you think that this comment is about the Ubunto logo.
Unfortunately, the title of this thread is misleading already. A logo can hardly be a ripoff of a typeface. And this discussion is but the logical consequence ...

@ Karsten

As long as there is only one crisp text face with said special stem-to-shoulder solution, then if someone else designs a crisp text face using said stem-to-shoulder solution too (even if a number of letters differ), then it is evident that this someone merely wanted to do "something like this". But once there are five or six typefaces sharing common characteristics, then you may speak of a genre […]

I miss the logic there. There are two typefaces that look very similar. And in this case it is evident, that the earlier one was the pattern of the later one? But in the moment a third typeface is created that looks very similar to both of the later ones, the evidence gets lost? That is not logical. And the passage that I quoted is not logical independent from the context.

If you had read my comment more carefully
But I admit, that you are right. I had not read your post very carefully.

Unfortunately, the title of this thread is misleading already. A logo can hardly be a ripoff of a typeface. And this discussion is but the logical consequence ...

As far as I have understood, there will come a whole Ubuntu font or font family. So let’s wait for the other outlines of the upright style and the italic.

By the way, my main problem with that Ubuntu typeface and Prokyon is, that more than one person has the bad idea to create such an ugly font. On the other side humans have more bad ideas than good ones. So the probability, that two persons have the same bad idea is higher than the probability, that two persons have the same good idea. In my opinion the whole genre, to which Prokyon belongs, is damn ugly. But you probably did not forget, that I am not a professional. Maybe you can discover the beauty of Prokyon only, if you are a professional. (No offence, I have a deep respect for the talents [in combination with the extreme patience that typedesign requires] of many of you!)

With regard to the simplicity of the idea (@ Chris), simplicity is not per se a symptom of quality. Even if I would get a free license of Prokyon, I would not use that font. The Ubuntu typeface is a ripoff of a rape of beauty. It does not have a constant aesthetic temperature, but looks like a walk through rooms with very different temperatures. If the typeface would be a house, I would get the gout. It looks like tube food, where the one end of the tube still was in liquid nitrogen, while the other was in bathwater.

However, even in science two persons have sometimes exactly the same idea, independent from each other, when the time for that idea has come.

@ k.l.: @ Mr Hosny: As said, this is an odd discussion because a logo cannot be a ripoff of a typeface. At worst, someone uses a typeface without a proper license as Ralf Hermann has already pointed out in his first comment.

The logo is created with a font that they intend to make publicly available under an open source licence at the end of March...

@ Octoploid: Please have a look at your earlier link and this link which show what they call "community logos". These shows words in a typeface which differs from the ubuntu logo design. See "brainstorm" and "forums". Since all there is right now is a logo, I am surprised how anybody can have strong opinions about a typeface.

@ Herr 'Enslin': Whether you or me like Prokyon and co or not is completely irrelevant when it comes to the question of plagiarism or not.

@ Herr 'Enslin': Whether you or me like Prokyon and co or not is completely irrelevant when it comes to the question of plagiarism or not.

Hehe, naturally! It just was a good opportunity to say, what I think about that damn ugly genre. In an ideal world only the ugly things would be pirated. But unfortunately thiefs have the same sense of taste and humor (!) than the other humans.

I have a question:

When I was hired in HEL Media Lab, they already had Diesel as a client. They had the childrens clothes line, and came up with Protokid, a net community based marketing system. Something quite new at 1996.

They had already made a logo based on Barmeno, and my first job was to take the logo, finish it, and I ended up with this:

So, are these based on Barmeno? Or are these based on a logo? I've never used Barmeno; I'm not a fan.