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Is this the wrong time to rant about font licensing though? I’ve always bought and paid for fonts, but as I’ve gradually transitioned to mobile app development,
by phony-account 1y ago
Is this the wrong time to rant about font licensing though? I’ve always bought and paid for fonts, but as I’ve gradually transitioned to mobile app development, I one day realized that all the fonts I bought for print are now worthless to me.
These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font will cost you 50 times more - for a single year.
I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. Maybe if their licenses were more realistic, piracy would be less of a problem.
- floriankarsten 1y ago[dead]
- giordanol 1y agofont licensing feels like it never caught up with how software actually gets made now. charging more for app use than for mass print always seemed backwards, especially when indie devs are scraping by and a font costs more than your backend. no wonder people end up using “free alternatives” without looking too hard at where they came from.
- nickff 1y agoI am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software are too expensive, but why is the pricing ‘backwards’? Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
- worik 1y ago> while software developers do. Ouch! What is wrong with me then?
- teruakohatu 1y ago> Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do. Do you have a citation for that? Printing a book costs just about nothing, it’s astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume. Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then you have retail margins and overhead. The top three book publishers’ have sales in the low billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range. It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used to be. The one problem with books is that shipping an individual book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
- hinkley 1y agoBook publishing is at least as bad as VC work. You publish a lot of books to have a catalog, and a few books make inordinately more money than the rest which keeps the lights on. New printings sound cheap enough, but a lot of books don’t get many of those. The long tail is very flat. And as for the authors, most would make a lot more money tutoring for the same number of hours of effort they put into the book. Those appearance fees might make it better, but how many people get those?
- indrora 1y agoShort answer: Nobody fucking knows because the accounting is more non-GAAP than your typical investment fraud house. A few spots for folks interested in some amount of numbers: https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-industry-statistics-substack-penguin-lawsuit.html https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-indu... https://archive.is/nGY6D https://archive.is/nGY6D https://janefriedman.com/book-pl/ https://janefriedman.com/book-pl/
- floriankarsten 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gorgoiler 1y agoWhatever the answer, I would caution you to listen carefully to the most product / marketing centric person who dares speak up. Font licensing feels like God tier product marketing.
- wyager 1y agoI haven't bought a ton of fonts, but iirc the licensing from US Graphics was pretty reasonable for software distribution. It was something like an extra $200 for app usage for an indie developer.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoA diffusion model for fonts. Isn't it time they get ripped off too? /SARCASM
- SubiculumCode 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43776539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43776539
- refulgentis 1y agoIn general, AFAIK, the general assumption is every font is absurdly easy to steal, and that you'll do so before purchasing it. So it's de facto "free unlimited trial, free for personal use, pay for business if you have a soul and shame"
- jsheard 1y agoI would suggest not pushing your luck with webfonts though, because in that case you are distributing the actual copyrighted "code" of the font, not just the minimally protected shapes that it outputs. There are services which crawl the web actively looking for pirated webfonts on behalf of foundries (and their lawyers).
- lifesaverluke 1y agoGot a link to such a service?
- jsheard 1y agohttps://www.fontradar.com https://www.fontradar.com is one. They also claim to analyze apps somehow.
- floriankarsten 1y ago[dead]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoHow robust is that identification? Does it just look for file hashes or identical character shapes? I imagine it is trivial to repackage a font file to break the hash fingerprint.
- SoMomentary 1y agoI had this happen to a client and even though they had both the web and print licenses they were hit with a 50k suite because the font file was malformed somehow. I'm not sure how it shook out but I hope they didn't pay a god damn cent.
- zeroq 1y agoAnd god forbid you to accidently ship the font with your game or mobile app! :)
- grishka 1y agoHow does one even use a font in an app without shipping it with the app? In a logo or something?
- tecleandor 1y agoYou can trace it, I guess...
- whstl 1y agoWhat if you convert it to bitmap, instead of shipping a TTF/WOFF/etc? Does it still counts as shipping the font... or not?
- bluescrn 1y agoAnd if you generate a set of bitmaps/sprites of individual glyphs from the font (e.g. to use as a bitmap font in a game), is that different to shipping an image with more specific uses of the font baked in, e.g. a logo/title image?
- trinix912 1y agoNo, because a font is licensed as a computer program that generates those glyphs. The glyphs themselves aren’t copyrightable.
- int_19h 1y agoBy using a font that is guaranteed to be provided by the system on which the app is running. Both Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android all make such guarantees. Linux DEs generally don't, but perhaps they should, given that open fonts with decent quality and extensive coverage are out there. Something like the Noto family.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 1y agoThere is maybe nothing in the entire world that I am less sympathetic towards than the cause of font piracy / font liberation. You have perfectly good --- in fact, historically excellent --- fonts loaded by default for free on any computer you buy today. Arguing for the oppression of font licenses is, to me, like arguing about how much it costs to buy something at Hermès. Just don't shop at Hermès.
- gkoberger 1y agoI agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries. I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
- Aeolun 1y agoModern included fonts aren’t that bad. It’s more like using tomato sauce instead of fancy handmade chilli. Your meal doesn’t deeply suffer, it’s just a bit bland.
- Nevermark 1y agoBranding is very important. Branding requires being distinctive, mixing novel visual and other aspects in a pleasing way. As far as I have been able to tell no major platform ships with the universal font of fonts (full coverage of all possible fonts with 4.5Mb seed) “AnyStyleYouWant” font. And none of the fonts they do ship have the “distinctive” feature. Until that day comes…
- int_19h 1y agoPlease keep your "branding" out of my UI. What I want from text in the apps I use is legibility first and foremost, not them screaming the brand at me every second I'm staring at them.
- al_borland 1y agoI've only purchased one font, which I use in my editor and terminal, so I don't have to worry much about the license. I can't be bothered to use custom fonts for any projects. With all the licensing considerations it just makes me cut out the whole idea to simplify my life.
- econ 1y agoSend in the LLMs! Jokes aside, I'm not very impressed with this single color font art. Maybe in 30 years we will have 16 color fonts? The color fonts currently work in Firefox and Edge, Safari support SBIX, Chrome on Android has CBDT I can barely find a website that has an example. The ones I found have a few characters or a single sentence, very few fonts and they are not very pretty. Some of the implementations warn that the client might catch fire. I'm not impressed. Some random examples of the state of the art. https://www.throwup.it/en/artists/mars/ https://www.throwup.it/en/artists/mars/
- pier25 1y agoI only purchase fonts for graphic design projects (mostly branding). For UIs I'm perfectly happy with Google Fonts.
- nativeit 1y agoThis maybe isn't relevant to your point, but the story in question is from long before mobile apps. Also, just for anyone cruising the comments before reading the story, it is more about the "You wouldn't steal a car" PSA's from >20-ish years ago. I don't recall there being any explicit advocacy for font licensing anywhere in it.
- Aurornis 1y ago> I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. The way this works is the design team picks some font, uses it on all of the design proposals, gets it approved by management, and then only later does a developer realize it’s a paid font they’ve been asked to put in the app. The teams want to avoid going back for design change approvals so eventually they just give up and pay the money. It’s not developers picky boutique expensive fonts, in my experience. It’s the designers who don’t think about the consequences because by they point it’s off their plate.
- odo1242 1y agoTo be fair though, there’s so many open source fonts out there of good quality that you don’t have to pay anyone to use their font. Why go against copyright laws when you can just use fonts like Roboto (or really, anything on Google Fonts) for free?
- cut3 1y agoAs a mostly now digital designer I get it... but also realize that digital has the capacity to scale instantly where print doesnt. Want to get 40 million editions out digitally? Gimme a sec. Physically? Gonna need to get some investment capital and a few years ramp up.
- whywhywhywhy 1y agoLegally they’re software so yeah it’s the same as licensing a proprietary piece of code.
- glitchc 1y agoWhy not just use free fonts? There are so many available that are perfectly good for most use-cases.
- thordenmark 1y agoI really good font is a fine work of craftsmanship that is time consuming to make. The type designer deserves compensation for their work. There are also plenty of license free, and B-tier fonts available if you are on a tight budget.
- viggity 1y agoI work in this industry, relatively new to it. There is a mind numbing amount of work that goes into font engineering.
- Chaosvex 1y agoInteresting that nobody brought up Discord, who recently(-ish) changed the typeface for chat messages in favour of a worse alternative, allegedly to avoid licensing costs.