9 ms·

A rant on web font licenses

139 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

jtbayly 4y ago
> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses. Oh, if only that were true.
- nullstyle 4y ago
  Can you think of any more egregious examples? Fonts are by far the worst in my experience.
  - HeavyFeather 4y ago
    “Skin in-app purchases” are quite popular these days.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    I mean, how about "buying" digital products that can be shut down at the whim of the distributor? Like e-books: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48829661 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48829661 Or games: https://www.wired.com/story/google-stadia-shutting-down-phil-harrison/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-stadia-shutting-down-phil... Or movies: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23199861/playstation-store-film-tv-show-removed-austria-germany-studiocanal https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23199861/playstation-store... Sometimes you get refunds, sometimes you don't. Also at the whim of the distributor!
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  I'm here for some horror stories if you have some you want to share.
conradfr 4y ago
> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses Has Oracle disappeared? The article is kind of true though, especially when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers, the licence often make it not worth it if you're not a company. There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money".
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  Oracle will sell you a perpetual license that you own forever. Most foundries won't do that for fonts (at least for web).
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Oracle still does a lot of fuckery with their licenses. For example, you're prevented to share any benchmarks you've performed with their software. Not sure it's been proven in court that you could prevent anyone from sharing such information, but at least they're trying.
    - dsr_ 4y ago
      It's true. Now, completely without benchmarks, I can tell you that my workplace has migrated from Oracle to Postgresql and performance is essentially the same: a few things were a little faster on Oracle, a few a little faster on PG. All revenue is directly or indirectly dependent on the database systems, which have been continuous for 20+ years: this is not a side-project. PG administration is much, much faster. Starting an Oracle database always involves a wait similar to booting an elderly operating system. Starting a PG database is fast. Things that Oracle will want to up-charge you to an Enterprise Edition license for, PG has for free. Want to spin up a new machine? No need to negotiate a new license with PG. The cost of the Oracle license would routinely be so large that you need to buy awesome hardware to justify it. You can install PG on anything, and justify it.
      - tiffanyh 4y ago
        Does your database run on NVMe storage? I ask because NVMe has neutralized a ton of performance differences across data related products.
        dsr_ 4y ago
        It did in the last generation of Oracle and this generation of PG.
nathell 4y ago
I like Matthew Butterick’s approach. He sells whole families at a time (on a pay-once basis), offers discounts if you get the whole library, and the license is short, to the point, and reasonable: https://mbtype.com/license/ https://mbtype.com/license/
- warpspin 4y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. That's truly a no bullshit licensing approach. Wish everyone would do it that way.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I love that the license includes the phrase “internet randos”.
    - duxup 4y ago
      I find myself using that phrase a lot. I don’t know why exactly, I think because it indicates a type of disconnected user that is hard to otherwise describe.
  - beefield 4y ago
    I guess we have different opinions what "no bullshit" means. This is what I consider no bullshit license: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL And yes, I also wish everyone used this license everywhere.
- neilv 4y ago
  Matthew Butterick is also a lawyer, so I'd guess he crafted the license himself.
- buraktamturk 4y ago
  Article 8: "[...] the webfonts (= WOFF2 files) can be used on up to three websites owned by the license buyer. [...] read–write copies of my fonts can be embedded in word-processing documents that will be shared with fewer than 20 people."
zdw 4y ago
Pricing like this has always made me wonder if there's some behind the scenes deals going on, where the web and font designer work together to sell some deep pocketed corporation on a site redesign that uses an expensive font, then split the recurring revenue. This likely would work in that case, as font licensing would be some small line item on the final bill. In moving previous employer away from an expensive designer who charged thousands of dollars a month to host a <100k/pageviews a month site that had minimally modified wordpress, they couldn't ever come up with valid license for the fonts used, so I also wonder if the licenses are ever actually enforced.
csixty4 4y ago
Indie type foundries are proliferating and I've seen so many amazing designs. I wish I could buy them all, but as a programmer I don't get a lot of chance to play with them. This issue doesn't just affect bloggers and small time content creators, either. Lots of big companies are commissioning their own typefaces or switching their brand standards to use free fonts. It's such a shame – I would love to see more variety and expressiveness out there.
jorgesborges 4y ago
Purchasing a font license for a personal website is an insane and sadistic extravagance, like pissing away $200 on a t-shirt.
- ale42 4y ago
  Depends if the font is $1200 or $20...
- Plasmoid 4y ago
  Buying a font ought to be on par with buying stock art. No necessary but if it makes you feel good, go for it.
  - browningstreet 4y ago
    Not a defense, but few outside fonts understand how hard fonts are to make, and to maintain, and to expand against feature-sets. It's more an artisanal world than a professional one, hence the craziness of some of the licensing schemes. Fonts are made and sold more like how the music world would be if music wasn't mainstream.
    - manuelmoreale 4y ago
      I was trained as a graphic designer. I have people in my circle who made fonts. I know how hard and time consuming it can be. And I wouldn't mind paying a fair price for them. It's the license the problem imo, not the price itself.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      As an outsider, can you give an estimate on what it would cost to have a font designed from the ground up, and get full rights to all the files? Are we talking $25k, $250k, $2.5m?
      - browningstreet 4y ago
        There are so many technical details involved in specifying what a font might be that it's impossible. As an example: Western/Latin, or international? How many weights, sizes, styles, and variations? A western international font requires thousands of characters/ligatures/etc. A WordPress site can be $500, $5K or $50K, depending on features, custom development, etc. Or more complicatedly, how much should a mobile app cost, and how much more should an iOS & Android mobile app cost, and how much more for a web version of some of the features..? Here's one of the problems: in the days before webfonts, fonts were sold to designers who put those fonts in their toolbox. They stayed in that toolbox and the font files themselves weren't distributed around with every client or every delivery of collateral. Output was rendered, that render didn't include the font. The font face tag existed for years before font designers and font companies were willing to change their POV on delivering full webfont files to every browser and every browser cache that received the webfont. This was very different than before. A font sold to a designer was used by one person, a webfont installed on a website had a theoretically unlimited file distribution -- it's basically a default napster for fonts. (Or more controversially, commercial apps without an app store). WOFF is just the exploitation of a bug to limit webfonts from desktop usage. It's a bit flip, and was easily altered. Iterations since have basically DRM firewalled desktop fonts from webfonts, but it's not very sophisticated. I can tell you that Fortune 50 companies can pay low millions to license a commercial font for time, across all platforms. It can take months to years to draw a font in all the characters/ligatures needed. Figure that's one designer (or an experienced designer, and a junior designer, working in tandem), working full-time, for 1-2 years, plus overhead, plus negotiations, plus specifications. How much do you think that's worth, or can be worth?
jackdh 4y ago
And yet this sort of license is unlikely to disappear. This is as it's not targeted at individuals or small teams, it's for large orgs who won't bat an eye and chalk it up to the cost of building the service.
ckdot2 4y ago
In my opinion in most cases it's neither worth the price nor worth the effort to use paid fonts on a website. There's a huge amount of fonts for free on Google Fonts. Also, yoou are allowed to host them on your own server, so there's no privacy issue.
- huhtenberg 4y ago
  Fun fact - versions that you can download from GF for self-hosting aren't necessarily what GF actually serves out. Got burned by this with Noto Sans when the self-hosted version had different x-height at a certain text size and looked notably worse than the one of GF service. Caveat emptor.
- EmilyHughes 4y ago
  In Austria there was recently a case of a women sueing thousands of businesses for using google fonts on their website. The reasoning was that the fonts are hosted on google, so by visiting these sites they sent her IP to google without her knowing (what is meant is just the font download via the browser from google servers, nothing was actually "sent"). Apparently she visited these thousands of business websites one by one and the infringement on her privacy caused her so much emotional damage that she wanted to be compensated for it. The women herself remained anonymous but last I heard the lawyer that worked with her on this got his tires slashed and threatend with violence.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    We had the same shit in Germany. The lawyer and the crying-wolf frontman are facing a criminal investigation and police seized 346.000€ in December last year [1]. > what is meant is just the font download via the browser from google servers, nothing was actually "sent" Well, Google does get sent the IP address, and that is enough to be covered by GDPR regulation. While I do think it's important the GDPR gets respected, I seriously think that enforcement needs a "severity" threshold for fines - and there needs to be some distinction between actually legitimate "necessary for functioning" data processing which would include stuff such as Google Fonts and between abuse of "necessary for functioning" data processing that includes all kinds of trackers. [1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/hannover_weser-leinegebiet/Google-Fonts-Razzien-wegen-illegaler-Abmahnungen,mahnschreiben100.html https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/hannover_weser-...
naillo 4y ago
Fonts still being able to make money makes me think that all this AI art generation probably won't put artists out of a job. Surely we have enough fonts at this point to be a 'solved' problem, and yet somehow people keep paying for it.
- agos 4y ago
  my guess is that in the context of any project which is not super tiny, 1k$ is still very affordable
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Yeah. If you're a big company and your designers/brand team are going for a specific look in your trade dress it may be worth it to license font(s) or even commission a new design. But with so much quality free stuff out there, it's hard to see it making sense for an individual or small business absent very unique requirements.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    I guess it depends 1) where you are in the world and 2) how you define "super tiny".
- nluken 4y ago
  Typography is a highly specialized field that requires a lot of semantic knowledge about how letters interact to execute well. It's a much harder problem (for humans and computers) than people realize.
matteason 4y ago
MyFonts' licensing system effectively took down our entire website recently. We have a font licenced for some number of pageviews (250,000 or whatever), and they track that via an @import in the CSS they give you which points to a URL on a subdomain of myfonts.net. Except they changed their licensing mechanism, didn't tell their customers and broke the subdomain the @import was hitting. It didn't fail immediately, just kept trying to load for ages, and so rendering was blocked and our pages didn't load. That was pretty frustrating.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  Wouldn't some of the font-display options be helpful for this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/font-display https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/... Here's some more information: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/font-display/ https://developer.chrome.com/blog/font-display/
  - bastawhiz 4y ago
    No. It's not about the font loading, it's about the CSS import loading.
- tonetheman 4y ago
  [dead]
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  This is ridiculous. HTML rendering is robust enough to work without CSS. A missing font should just be defaulted to serif or sans and that's it.
  - lozenge 4y ago
    It wasn't missing, it was slow. Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? If you want to avoid that then you have to wait.
    - 4y ago
rntz 4y ago
This situation is beginning to improve if you know where to look. There are several typeface designers who offer both low prices and reasonable licensing terms for their fonts; for instance, David Jonathan Ross (https://djr.com/ https://djr.com/) has a "Font of the Month Club" that gives you one font per month at $6/month; even without membership you can get previous club fonts for $24; and the licensing terms are plain english. Matthew Butterick's fonts cost more ($120 for a full typeface; mbtype.com) but have a very reasonable plain-English license. That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok - big websites can afford to pay more, and I wouldn't be surprised if a disproportionate amount of a typeface designer's income will come from a few heavy hitters; so without charging more for big websites, they'd have to raise the price for small ones, pricing hobbyists like me out of the market. Big font companies, though, often require you to install intrusive javascript tracking code to enforce these agreements, which is a step too far for me. Fonts are pretty much a pure crystallization of the "information wants to be free"/"artists want to be paid" tradeoff. Digital fonts are nothing but information, so it seems absurd to charge more for using them on more websites/in more documents/with a larger team - there's no additional cost being incurred!; but without artificial restrictions on reuse, typeface designers wouldn't get paid at all. tl;dr You're going to get better treatment and better prices from little one-person font designer shops than from the big companies (Monotype, Hoefler & Co). Unless you're a big co yourself, the OP is right; they're a waste of your time. But the little guys are a decent option, you just have to hunt around.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  I didn't know about DJR's Font of the Month Club. That's kinda neat. > That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok Why do you think that's ok if you don't mind me asking? I worked on sites that used to generate lots of views but made 0 money because were not designed to be commercial projects. Why should I pay more money for a digital asset just because my site gets popular? It's not getting popular because of the font. Can you imagine if a CMS started charging you more money if your site becomes popular? What difference does it make to them? I just find it baffling.
oldstrangers 4y ago
The silliest thing I learned years ago was that the license only applies to the "software" of the font. In the US, you can literally go and vectorize any font in the world and do whatever you want with it. "In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright, though the shapes may be protected by design patent (although these are rarely applied for, the first US design patent ever awarded was for a typeface)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... Also from somebodynew: "A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software." [1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf
- perk 4y ago
  I've read something along this lines before, but cannot find a good source for it. Do you have one?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Basically fonts are copyrightable but typefaces are not. Font names are also trademarkable. https://glarts.org/font-and-typeface-legal-tip-sheet/ https://glarts.org/font-and-typeface-legal-tip-sheet/
    - luckylion 4y ago
      If that holds up in court, why aren't there free/open source/cheaper versions of typefaces that look just like some font but are named differently?
      - ghaff 4y ago
        There are. (With the caveat of look the same as some typeface. Not all the kerning and so forth may be identical.) Overpass is one example I'm familiar with off the top of my head but there are many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass_(typeface) Arial, notably, is also similar to (though distinguishable from with some letterforms) Helvetica.
c0l0 4y ago
I think it's often a mistake to insist on a third-party font if an environment-/OS-native font family does a good enough job already - it's just more data transferred, text often "jumping" around when the font data has finally been processed and is ready to render, and (often, in real-world use) data needlessly exfiltrated to some font-hosting CDN operator. The only third-party font I'd consider using (for reasons of superior accessibility, not style) on websites and the like is the [Atkinson Hyperlegible Font](https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont), which is free to use and redistribute.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Self-hosted fonts load extremely fast for the user if you are conservative with what you include. The fallback system font should be as similar as possible, so that text doesn't jump around.
xhkkffbf 4y ago
Yeah, it can be a pain to pay font creators, but I expect that this web designer would be annoyed if his clients complained about paying him. Yes, some of the mechanisms can be fragile or troublesome, but I think that's the market's way of exploring possible options. The companies that came up with the idea of charging per the page view were probably responding to designers who didn't want to pay too much for small jobs. It's a trade off.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  I am not complaining about paying. I've been paying for a fonts.com sub since probably 2013 or 2014. I bought dozen of indidual fonts from small foundries. I have no problem paying for licenses. My problem is the licenses themselves.
seabass-labrax 4y ago
The Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface which is referred to in this article was first released in 1898, meaning that any patent or copyright claims on the original designs will have well and truly expired by now. However, specific digitisations of typefaces are subject to copyright individually, which is what allows such companies to charge royalties for their use. Whilst I couldn't find any truly free and open digitisations of Akzidenz-Grotesk, Berthold do seem to have a 'personal use only' licence which may be sufficient for a personal website. A passable substitute for Akzidenz-Grotesk (and a very nice free typeface in its own right) is Liberation Sans, freely available under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  I only stumbled on that because a client of mine had his entire branding designed with Akzidenz and I'm in the process of redesigning his site. Two site actually. He'd have to pay more than €6k/year just for the webfont which is just stupid.
lancesells 4y ago
Let's be a little more real here. Very, very few font designers are getting rich off of their fonts. Since these are digital objects piracy is a big factor. The reason they have the page views in there are usually so giant corporations like Coca-Cola can't buy a $500 license and serve it up to millions. There are thousands of cheap or free options out there. This isn't a case where there's a limited supply.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  But then giant corporations end up hiring font designers and they commission custom typefaces to get around the issue. So I don’t think this is a smart model. But the hell do I know.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  Typically you pick your market: either sell to many small customers at a low price, or you sell to a few big customers at a big price. Font designers are trying to do both at the same time, and as a result the experience sucks.
mastax 4y ago
This could be a good place to have a traditional sales team. Now, I usually hate that type of thing with a burning passion. The first thing I do when I see "contact us" where the price should be is look to find an alternative to buy. But it sounds like these types of sales could use some flexibility and the human touch is good for that. If they're the New York Times, charge them $250k a year, sure. If they're some blogger, give them a low flat rate for personal use, even if their blog gets lots of pageviews from Hacker News occasionally. Replace stringent pageview accounting with flexible pricing.
rcarmo 4y ago
I gave up on web fonts right from the start, really. My site uses Georgia with a set of CSS fallbacks to other serifs, plus the equivalent for monospace. But I've worked in places with licensed web fonts, and we would always host our own copies, plus we'd be extremely careful to minimize their use.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  I ended up doing the same on my site. A stack of OS fonts and I don’t have to worry about load times and all that.
agos 4y ago
I was in the market for something like that recently and had similar thoughts. It also introduces a lot of fear in the buying process (will I end up paying more for the fonts than I do for bandwidth if my project has moderate success?) I think suggestions for reasonably priced fonts would be very welcome in this thread
garrickvanburen 4y ago
Some things never change. This was one of my biggest frustrations 10+ yrs ago. #Kernest.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  Makes me feel less lonely so thank you for the comment
crazygringo 4y ago
Slightly tangential, but here's something I've never understood: from what everyone says, font designs aren't copyrightable or protected in any way -- only their digital expression is. So why aren't people producing identical open-source clones of expensive typefaces left and right? If you write a script to render each letterform to a 10000x10000 pixel bitmap, and then run a decent bitmap-to-Bezier-curve pathtracing algorithm, you'll come up with your own independent digital representation based on the design alone. Do this for every pair of characters and you'll get all the kerning data too. You won't get hinting, but these days with retina screens and Mac font rendering and 600 dpi printers you don't really need it anymore anyways. (Plus auto-hinting is often good enough on a low-DPI Windows screen, where it still does make a big difference.) And even if there are license restrictions which technically prevent the licensee of a typeface from doing this... they can still produce the bitmaps, and then hand them off to a friend to do the digitization, who hasn't agreed to any terms at all. It seems so easy to automate... is there a reason why this kind of "legal piracy" doesn't exist already? Is there something I'm missing? (And I'm not talking about fonts that are designed to be intentionally similar but not perfectly identical to existing fonts, the way Arial mimicked Helvetica -- I'm talking about an exact clone.) Edit: just to be clear, I'm not condoning this idea. It would probably destroy the font industry and make it impossible for font designers to make much of a living. I'm just curious why this seemingly inevitable outcome hasn't happened.
donatj 4y ago
> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses. There are many cases of this, and it seems to be growing. See what happens when you surpass the Google Analytics free tier. Go from completely free to $150,000 overnight. It was a real nightmare for us because since we license to institutions, our dollars-per-user is very low. We make very little money per-user compared to something like a shopping website. Basing that purely on number of users is nothing but trouble. We had a similar situation with our prefered CI software. It goes from totally free to $6,000 per year once you hit a certain number of builds.
mortenjorck 4y ago
Linked at the end of the article is something that I can't believe I haven't come across already (as a designer): https://www.fontshare.com https://www.fontshare.com I initially assumed the author had linked it simply as a commercial type foundry with reasonable web licensing, but I did a double-take when I realized these were all free (beer rather than speech, thus distinct from the OFL community), in what appears to be a rather expansive freemium project from Indian Type Foundry. While I'll have to spend some time using these to get a real sense of them (font quality often comes down to kerning pairs), my first impression is that these look absolutely top-tier, in the same league as both leading commercial type families and the best OFL projects.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  I found it recently. Most of those fonts are excellent and there’s also a nice selection of variable fonts which for web use are incredibly handy.
EdgeExplorer 4y ago
I can highly recommend FontSpring's "Worry-Free" licenses if you're looking for a simpler approach to buying fonts. https://www.fontspring.com/worry-free https://www.fontspring.com/worry-free
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  This is actually a reasonable license! Thank you for sharing, will add it to my post.
tsp 4y ago
The only font shop that I still buy web fonts from is Fontshop [1]. Their license is based on trust instead of tracking scripts. [1]
shove 4y ago
On the one hand, the author is correct that rent-seeking on Akzindenz (a font that predates Helvetica for godsake) is some crazy bullshit. On the other, modern typographers are some of the lowest paid graphic artists out there. Doing a gazillion glyphs, balancing weights, kerning … it’s a ridiculous amount of work
d-z-m 4y ago
On the topic of good open-source webfont sources. I like the ethos/aesthetic of the League of Moveable Type. https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ Also, most of their fonts are OFL licensed.

139 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses. Oh, if only that were true.

nullstyle 4y ago
Can you think of any more egregious examples? Fonts are by far the worst in my experience.
- HeavyFeather 4y ago
  “Skin in-app purchases” are quite popular these days.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  I mean, how about "buying" digital products that can be shut down at the whim of the distributor? Like e-books: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48829661 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48829661 Or games: https://www.wired.com/story/google-stadia-shutting-down-phil-harrison/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-stadia-shutting-down-phil... Or movies: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23199861/playstation-store-film-tv-show-removed-austria-germany-studiocanal https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23199861/playstation-store... Sometimes you get refunds, sometimes you don't. Also at the whim of the distributor!
manuelmoreale 4y ago
I'm here for some horror stories if you have some you want to share.

conradfr 4y ago

> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses Has Oracle disappeared? The article is kind of true though, especially when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers, the licence often make it not worth it if you're not a company. There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money".

tiffanyh 4y ago
Oracle will sell you a perpetual license that you own forever. Most foundries won't do that for fonts (at least for web).
- capableweb 4y ago
  Oracle still does a lot of fuckery with their licenses. For example, you're prevented to share any benchmarks you've performed with their software. Not sure it's been proven in court that you could prevent anyone from sharing such information, but at least they're trying.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    It's true. Now, completely without benchmarks, I can tell you that my workplace has migrated from Oracle to Postgresql and performance is essentially the same: a few things were a little faster on Oracle, a few a little faster on PG. All revenue is directly or indirectly dependent on the database systems, which have been continuous for 20+ years: this is not a side-project. PG administration is much, much faster. Starting an Oracle database always involves a wait similar to booting an elderly operating system. Starting a PG database is fast. Things that Oracle will want to up-charge you to an Enterprise Edition license for, PG has for free. Want to spin up a new machine? No need to negotiate a new license with PG. The cost of the Oracle license would routinely be so large that you need to buy awesome hardware to justify it. You can install PG on anything, and justify it.
    - tiffanyh 4y ago
      Does your database run on NVMe storage? I ask because NVMe has neutralized a ton of performance differences across data related products.
      - dsr_ 4y ago
        It did in the last generation of Oracle and this generation of PG.

nathell 4y ago

I like Matthew Butterick’s approach. He sells whole families at a time (on a pay-once basis), offers discounts if you get the whole library, and the license is short, to the point, and reasonable: https://mbtype.com/license/ https://mbtype.com/license/

warpspin 4y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. That's truly a no bullshit licensing approach. Wish everyone would do it that way.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I love that the license includes the phrase “internet randos”.
  - duxup 4y ago
    I find myself using that phrase a lot. I don’t know why exactly, I think because it indicates a type of disconnected user that is hard to otherwise describe.
- beefield 4y ago
  I guess we have different opinions what "no bullshit" means. This is what I consider no bullshit license: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL And yes, I also wish everyone used this license everywhere.
neilv 4y ago
Matthew Butterick is also a lawyer, so I'd guess he crafted the license himself.
buraktamturk 4y ago
Article 8: "[...] the webfonts (= WOFF2 files) can be used on up to three websites owned by the license buyer. [...] read–write copies of my fonts can be embedded in word-processing documents that will be shared with fewer than 20 people."

zdw 4y ago

Pricing like this has always made me wonder if there's some behind the scenes deals going on, where the web and font designer work together to sell some deep pocketed corporation on a site redesign that uses an expensive font, then split the recurring revenue. This likely would work in that case, as font licensing would be some small line item on the final bill. In moving previous employer away from an expensive designer who charged thousands of dollars a month to host a <100k/pageviews a month site that had minimally modified wordpress, they couldn't ever come up with valid license for the fonts used, so I also wonder if the licenses are ever actually enforced.

csixty4 4y ago

Indie type foundries are proliferating and I've seen so many amazing designs. I wish I could buy them all, but as a programmer I don't get a lot of chance to play with them. This issue doesn't just affect bloggers and small time content creators, either. Lots of big companies are commissioning their own typefaces or switching their brand standards to use free fonts. It's such a shame – I would love to see more variety and expressiveness out there.

jorgesborges 4y ago

Purchasing a font license for a personal website is an insane and sadistic extravagance, like pissing away $200 on a t-shirt.

ale42 4y ago
Depends if the font is $1200 or $20...
Plasmoid 4y ago
Buying a font ought to be on par with buying stock art. No necessary but if it makes you feel good, go for it.
- browningstreet 4y ago
  Not a defense, but few outside fonts understand how hard fonts are to make, and to maintain, and to expand against feature-sets. It's more an artisanal world than a professional one, hence the craziness of some of the licensing schemes. Fonts are made and sold more like how the music world would be if music wasn't mainstream.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    I was trained as a graphic designer. I have people in my circle who made fonts. I know how hard and time consuming it can be. And I wouldn't mind paying a fair price for them. It's the license the problem imo, not the price itself.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    As an outsider, can you give an estimate on what it would cost to have a font designed from the ground up, and get full rights to all the files? Are we talking $25k, $250k, $2.5m?
    - browningstreet 4y ago
      There are so many technical details involved in specifying what a font might be that it's impossible. As an example: Western/Latin, or international? How many weights, sizes, styles, and variations? A western international font requires thousands of characters/ligatures/etc. A WordPress site can be $500, $5K or $50K, depending on features, custom development, etc. Or more complicatedly, how much should a mobile app cost, and how much more should an iOS & Android mobile app cost, and how much more for a web version of some of the features..? Here's one of the problems: in the days before webfonts, fonts were sold to designers who put those fonts in their toolbox. They stayed in that toolbox and the font files themselves weren't distributed around with every client or every delivery of collateral. Output was rendered, that render didn't include the font. The font face tag existed for years before font designers and font companies were willing to change their POV on delivering full webfont files to every browser and every browser cache that received the webfont. This was very different than before. A font sold to a designer was used by one person, a webfont installed on a website had a theoretically unlimited file distribution -- it's basically a default napster for fonts. (Or more controversially, commercial apps without an app store). WOFF is just the exploitation of a bug to limit webfonts from desktop usage. It's a bit flip, and was easily altered. Iterations since have basically DRM firewalled desktop fonts from webfonts, but it's not very sophisticated. I can tell you that Fortune 50 companies can pay low millions to license a commercial font for time, across all platforms. It can take months to years to draw a font in all the characters/ligatures needed. Figure that's one designer (or an experienced designer, and a junior designer, working in tandem), working full-time, for 1-2 years, plus overhead, plus negotiations, plus specifications. How much do you think that's worth, or can be worth?

jackdh 4y ago

And yet this sort of license is unlikely to disappear. This is as it's not targeted at individuals or small teams, it's for large orgs who won't bat an eye and chalk it up to the cost of building the service.

ckdot2 4y ago

In my opinion in most cases it's neither worth the price nor worth the effort to use paid fonts on a website. There's a huge amount of fonts for free on Google Fonts. Also, yoou are allowed to host them on your own server, so there's no privacy issue.

huhtenberg 4y ago
Fun fact - versions that you can download from GF for self-hosting aren't necessarily what GF actually serves out. Got burned by this with Noto Sans when the self-hosted version had different x-height at a certain text size and looked notably worse than the one of GF service. Caveat emptor.
EmilyHughes 4y ago
In Austria there was recently a case of a women sueing thousands of businesses for using google fonts on their website. The reasoning was that the fonts are hosted on google, so by visiting these sites they sent her IP to google without her knowing (what is meant is just the font download via the browser from google servers, nothing was actually "sent"). Apparently she visited these thousands of business websites one by one and the infringement on her privacy caused her so much emotional damage that she wanted to be compensated for it. The women herself remained anonymous but last I heard the lawyer that worked with her on this got his tires slashed and threatend with violence.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  We had the same shit in Germany. The lawyer and the crying-wolf frontman are facing a criminal investigation and police seized 346.000€ in December last year [1]. > what is meant is just the font download via the browser from google servers, nothing was actually "sent" Well, Google does get sent the IP address, and that is enough to be covered by GDPR regulation. While I do think it's important the GDPR gets respected, I seriously think that enforcement needs a "severity" threshold for fines - and there needs to be some distinction between actually legitimate "necessary for functioning" data processing which would include stuff such as Google Fonts and between abuse of "necessary for functioning" data processing that includes all kinds of trackers. [1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/hannover_weser-leinegebiet/Google-Fonts-Razzien-wegen-illegaler-Abmahnungen,mahnschreiben100.html https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/hannover_weser-...

naillo 4y ago

Fonts still being able to make money makes me think that all this AI art generation probably won't put artists out of a job. Surely we have enough fonts at this point to be a 'solved' problem, and yet somehow people keep paying for it.

agos 4y ago
my guess is that in the context of any project which is not super tiny, 1k$ is still very affordable
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah. If you're a big company and your designers/brand team are going for a specific look in your trade dress it may be worth it to license font(s) or even commission a new design. But with so much quality free stuff out there, it's hard to see it making sense for an individual or small business absent very unique requirements.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  I guess it depends 1) where you are in the world and 2) how you define "super tiny".
nluken 4y ago
Typography is a highly specialized field that requires a lot of semantic knowledge about how letters interact to execute well. It's a much harder problem (for humans and computers) than people realize.

matteason 4y ago

MyFonts' licensing system effectively took down our entire website recently. We have a font licenced for some number of pageviews (250,000 or whatever), and they track that via an @import in the CSS they give you which points to a URL on a subdomain of myfonts.net. Except they changed their licensing mechanism, didn't tell their customers and broke the subdomain the @import was hitting. It didn't fail immediately, just kept trying to load for ages, and so rendering was blocked and our pages didn't load. That was pretty frustrating.

KronisLV 4y ago
Wouldn't some of the font-display options be helpful for this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/font-display https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/... Here's some more information: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/font-display/ https://developer.chrome.com/blog/font-display/
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  No. It's not about the font loading, it's about the CSS import loading.
tonetheman 4y ago
[dead]
johnchristopher 4y ago
This is ridiculous. HTML rendering is robust enough to work without CSS. A missing font should just be defaulted to serif or sans and that's it.
- lozenge 4y ago
  It wasn't missing, it was slow. Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? If you want to avoid that then you have to wait.
  - 4y ago

rntz 4y ago

This situation is beginning to improve if you know where to look. There are several typeface designers who offer both low prices and reasonable licensing terms for their fonts; for instance, David Jonathan Ross (https://djr.com/ https://djr.com/) has a "Font of the Month Club" that gives you one font per month at $6/month; even without membership you can get previous club fonts for $24; and the licensing terms are plain english. Matthew Butterick's fonts cost more ($120 for a full typeface; mbtype.com) but have a very reasonable plain-English license. That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok - big websites can afford to pay more, and I wouldn't be surprised if a disproportionate amount of a typeface designer's income will come from a few heavy hitters; so without charging more for big websites, they'd have to raise the price for small ones, pricing hobbyists like me out of the market. Big font companies, though, often require you to install intrusive javascript tracking code to enforce these agreements, which is a step too far for me. Fonts are pretty much a pure crystallization of the "information wants to be free"/"artists want to be paid" tradeoff. Digital fonts are nothing but information, so it seems absurd to charge more for using them on more websites/in more documents/with a larger team - there's no additional cost being incurred!; but without artificial restrictions on reuse, typeface designers wouldn't get paid at all. tl;dr You're going to get better treatment and better prices from little one-person font designer shops than from the big companies (Monotype, Hoefler & Co). Unless you're a big co yourself, the OP is right; they're a waste of your time. But the little guys are a decent option, you just have to hunt around.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
I didn't know about DJR's Font of the Month Club. That's kinda neat. > That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok Why do you think that's ok if you don't mind me asking? I worked on sites that used to generate lots of views but made 0 money because were not designed to be commercial projects. Why should I pay more money for a digital asset just because my site gets popular? It's not getting popular because of the font. Can you imagine if a CMS started charging you more money if your site becomes popular? What difference does it make to them? I just find it baffling.

oldstrangers 4y ago

The silliest thing I learned years ago was that the license only applies to the "software" of the font. In the US, you can literally go and vectorize any font in the world and do whatever you want with it. "In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright, though the shapes may be protected by design patent (although these are rarely applied for, the first US design patent ever awarded was for a typeface)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... Also from somebodynew: "A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software." [1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf

perk 4y ago
I've read something along this lines before, but cannot find a good source for it. Do you have one?
- ghaff 4y ago
  Basically fonts are copyrightable but typefaces are not. Font names are also trademarkable. https://glarts.org/font-and-typeface-legal-tip-sheet/ https://glarts.org/font-and-typeface-legal-tip-sheet/
  - luckylion 4y ago
    If that holds up in court, why aren't there free/open source/cheaper versions of typefaces that look just like some font but are named differently?
    - ghaff 4y ago
      There are. (With the caveat of look the same as some typeface. Not all the kerning and so forth may be identical.) Overpass is one example I'm familiar with off the top of my head but there are many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass_(typeface) Arial, notably, is also similar to (though distinguishable from with some letterforms) Helvetica.

c0l0 4y ago

I think it's often a mistake to insist on a third-party font if an environment-/OS-native font family does a good enough job already - it's just more data transferred, text often "jumping" around when the font data has finally been processed and is ready to render, and (often, in real-world use) data needlessly exfiltrated to some font-hosting CDN operator. The only third-party font I'd consider using (for reasons of superior accessibility, not style) on websites and the like is the [Atkinson Hyperlegible Font](https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont), which is free to use and redistribute.

carlosjobim 4y ago
Self-hosted fonts load extremely fast for the user if you are conservative with what you include. The fallback system font should be as similar as possible, so that text doesn't jump around.

xhkkffbf 4y ago

Yeah, it can be a pain to pay font creators, but I expect that this web designer would be annoyed if his clients complained about paying him. Yes, some of the mechanisms can be fragile or troublesome, but I think that's the market's way of exploring possible options. The companies that came up with the idea of charging per the page view were probably responding to designers who didn't want to pay too much for small jobs. It's a trade off.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
I am not complaining about paying. I've been paying for a fonts.com sub since probably 2013 or 2014. I bought dozen of indidual fonts from small foundries. I have no problem paying for licenses. My problem is the licenses themselves.

seabass-labrax 4y ago

The Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface which is referred to in this article was first released in 1898, meaning that any patent or copyright claims on the original designs will have well and truly expired by now. However, specific digitisations of typefaces are subject to copyright individually, which is what allows such companies to charge royalties for their use. Whilst I couldn't find any truly free and open digitisations of Akzidenz-Grotesk, Berthold do seem to have a 'personal use only' licence which may be sufficient for a personal website. A passable substitute for Akzidenz-Grotesk (and a very nice free typeface in its own right) is Liberation Sans, freely available under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
I only stumbled on that because a client of mine had his entire branding designed with Akzidenz and I'm in the process of redesigning his site. Two site actually. He'd have to pay more than €6k/year just for the webfont which is just stupid.

lancesells 4y ago

Let's be a little more real here. Very, very few font designers are getting rich off of their fonts. Since these are digital objects piracy is a big factor. The reason they have the page views in there are usually so giant corporations like Coca-Cola can't buy a $500 license and serve it up to millions. There are thousands of cheap or free options out there. This isn't a case where there's a limited supply.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
But then giant corporations end up hiring font designers and they commission custom typefaces to get around the issue. So I don’t think this is a smart model. But the hell do I know.
newaccount74 4y ago
Typically you pick your market: either sell to many small customers at a low price, or you sell to a few big customers at a big price. Font designers are trying to do both at the same time, and as a result the experience sucks.

mastax 4y ago

This could be a good place to have a traditional sales team. Now, I usually hate that type of thing with a burning passion. The first thing I do when I see "contact us" where the price should be is look to find an alternative to buy. But it sounds like these types of sales could use some flexibility and the human touch is good for that. If they're the New York Times, charge them $250k a year, sure. If they're some blogger, give them a low flat rate for personal use, even if their blog gets lots of pageviews from Hacker News occasionally. Replace stringent pageview accounting with flexible pricing.

rcarmo 4y ago

I gave up on web fonts right from the start, really. My site uses Georgia with a set of CSS fallbacks to other serifs, plus the equivalent for monospace. But I've worked in places with licensed web fonts, and we would always host our own copies, plus we'd be extremely careful to minimize their use.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
I ended up doing the same on my site. A stack of OS fonts and I don’t have to worry about load times and all that.

agos 4y ago

I was in the market for something like that recently and had similar thoughts. It also introduces a lot of fear in the buying process (will I end up paying more for the fonts than I do for bandwidth if my project has moderate success?) I think suggestions for reasonably priced fonts would be very welcome in this thread

garrickvanburen 4y ago

Some things never change. This was one of my biggest frustrations 10+ yrs ago. #Kernest.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
Makes me feel less lonely so thank you for the comment

crazygringo 4y ago

Slightly tangential, but here's something I've never understood: from what everyone says, font designs aren't copyrightable or protected in any way -- only their digital expression is. So why aren't people producing identical open-source clones of expensive typefaces left and right? If you write a script to render each letterform to a 10000x10000 pixel bitmap, and then run a decent bitmap-to-Bezier-curve pathtracing algorithm, you'll come up with your own independent digital representation based on the design alone. Do this for every pair of characters and you'll get all the kerning data too. You won't get hinting, but these days with retina screens and Mac font rendering and 600 dpi printers you don't really need it anymore anyways. (Plus auto-hinting is often good enough on a low-DPI Windows screen, where it still does make a big difference.) And even if there are license restrictions which technically prevent the licensee of a typeface from doing this... they can still produce the bitmaps, and then hand them off to a friend to do the digitization, who hasn't agreed to any terms at all. It seems so easy to automate... is there a reason why this kind of "legal piracy" doesn't exist already? Is there something I'm missing? (And I'm not talking about fonts that are designed to be intentionally similar but not perfectly identical to existing fonts, the way Arial mimicked Helvetica -- I'm talking about an exact clone.) Edit: just to be clear, I'm not condoning this idea. It would probably destroy the font industry and make it impossible for font designers to make much of a living. I'm just curious why this seemingly inevitable outcome hasn't happened.

donatj 4y ago

> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses. There are many cases of this, and it seems to be growing. See what happens when you surpass the Google Analytics free tier. Go from completely free to $150,000 overnight. It was a real nightmare for us because since we license to institutions, our dollars-per-user is very low. We make very little money per-user compared to something like a shopping website. Basing that purely on number of users is nothing but trouble. We had a similar situation with our prefered CI software. It goes from totally free to $6,000 per year once you hit a certain number of builds.

mortenjorck 4y ago

Linked at the end of the article is something that I can't believe I haven't come across already (as a designer): https://www.fontshare.com https://www.fontshare.com I initially assumed the author had linked it simply as a commercial type foundry with reasonable web licensing, but I did a double-take when I realized these were all free (beer rather than speech, thus distinct from the OFL community), in what appears to be a rather expansive freemium project from Indian Type Foundry. While I'll have to spend some time using these to get a real sense of them (font quality often comes down to kerning pairs), my first impression is that these look absolutely top-tier, in the same league as both leading commercial type families and the best OFL projects.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
I found it recently. Most of those fonts are excellent and there’s also a nice selection of variable fonts which for web use are incredibly handy.

EdgeExplorer 4y ago

I can highly recommend FontSpring's "Worry-Free" licenses if you're looking for a simpler approach to buying fonts. https://www.fontspring.com/worry-free https://www.fontspring.com/worry-free

manuelmoreale 4y ago
This is actually a reasonable license! Thank you for sharing, will add it to my post.

tsp 4y ago

The only font shop that I still buy web fonts from is Fontshop [1]. Their license is based on trust instead of tracking scripts. [1]

shove 4y ago

On the one hand, the author is correct that rent-seeking on Akzindenz (a font that predates Helvetica for godsake) is some crazy bullshit. On the other, modern typographers are some of the lowest paid graphic artists out there. Doing a gazillion glyphs, balancing weights, kerning … it’s a ridiculous amount of work

d-z-m 4y ago

On the topic of good open-source webfont sources. I like the ethos/aesthetic of the League of Moveable Type. https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ Also, most of their fonts are OFL licensed.