From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 19:37:24 EST
At 14:25 -0500 2003-12-03, Edward H. Trager wrote:
>WHY NOT just *give* away the Linear B, Ogham, Cherokee, and lots and
>lots of other fonts that are of interest to specialized user
>communities?
Because I'm not independently wealthy? Because I already give as much as I can?
>My hunch is that Everson Typography will never make any money from a
>Linear B or Cherokee font anyway. The markets are just too small.
>Giving away those fonts would benefit those communities while
>simultaneously bolstering the reputation of the font vendor as a
>charitable corporate citizen.
I already have the reputation as a charitable citizen, haven't I?
Perhaps it isn't charitable enough....
>In fact, I'm sure marketing types could convince us that giving away
>some stuff for free is good for business and later generates sales
>of other stuff to all of those happy customers.
YOU try to sell alphabets sometime.
>However, I would not suggest giving those fonts away to an OS vendor
>like Microsoft or Apple or Sun or Redhat. You could either
>distribute them from your own web site under an appropriate license
>(i.e., one granting individuals free non-commercial use), or donate
>them to a community organization [...]
>
>Just my two cents.
I've got an idea. Why don't you, and your friends, and your friends'
friends, all decide to give generously to the Script Encoding
Initiative http://www.unicode.org/sei/ between now and the end of
2003? It's tax deductible.
I put my money where my mouth is. I don't go on holidays or
vacations. I attend standardization meetings two or three times a
year instead. I spend a good deal of time working on script proposals
and other aspects of this work. On occasion this has been helped by
the SEI, and when it's not, I try to do the best I can even so,
though my time has to be taken up typesetting instead. Sure, if I
were much of a businessman, maybe things would be different. But so
would the Unicode Standard 4.0. It would be a lot poorer.
Do you believe in the Unicode Project enough to give to the SEI? To
actually help us do what we need to do? And not just you, Ed.
All of you.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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