Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:59:00 GMT
It blows my mind that Adobe just posted 1000 words on its typography blog to help designers approach the complexities of web-font licensing. If it’s that hard to understand what you need to understand to use web fonts “legally,” why even bother? Why risk getting it wrong and being audited or worse?
Isn’t it safer and easier to forget the big foundries and their complicated licensing schemes and just use open-source fonts? There are plenty of choices these days:
When there are more than enough high-quality open-source fonts to meet almost every practical need, why suffer licensing hassles and the risks of non-compliance? Just pick an open font and get back to life.
Posted in web development
Tags fonts, freedom, licensing, open, source
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:45:00 GMT
After reading about the ordeal a paying customer went through attempting to
get Adobe to fix a simple
mistake, I
was reminded of why I lost my faith in proprietary software. After a
bad experience reinstalling
Win2k, it
dawned upon me that software vendors could waste my time, make me jump
through hoops, and sell me barely functional crap, and all I could do,
as a paying customer with a valid license, was take it.
This poor guy, for example, ordered a Mac OS X version of Flash CS3
and got sent a Windows version by mistake. Not his fault. But he’s
the guy who ended up wasting weeks fighting Adobe’s ineffective
customer support trying to get what he paid for in the first place.
This guy is a paying customer. He paid for that treatment.
Look, folks, the world of open source isn’t perfect, but it’s better
than that. Since dumping Windows for Linux, here’s how much
time I’ve wasted on stupid vendor hoop-jumping: None. Nada. Zero.
In the world of open source, you never have to worry about getting
stuck with the wrong version of software. That’s because you are
always free to download the right version. No need to ask for vendor
approval, fax in your “Letter of Destruction”, or wait for an
activation code. You just type in “yum install whatever”, the software installs, and you go back to work. That’s it.
Until I switched to the open-source lifestyle, I never realized how
much time (and blood and sweat) I had wasted on the side effects of
proprietary software. If you’re still in the proprietary world, take
a moment to consider how much time you have wasted and how much time
you will waste in the next few years on stupid vendor crap. Maybe
it’s time to stop jumping through hoops. Maybe it’s worth your while
to give open source a shot.
Go ahead, grab a Fedora Live
CD and test drive it for a few
days. What have you got to lose but a world of hurt?
Posted in rants
Tags adobe, fedora, freedom, linux, proprietary
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