Re: Fonts for distribution

[Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas mailhot laposte net>]

Simos Xenitellis <simos74 <at> gmx.net> writes:

> Fedora has Dejavu 2.3 (latest) in their repository.

And if I may chirp in the DejaVu in Fedora Extras is rebuilt from sfd sources -
it's not the upstream binary dump.

While I appreciate all the new font projects none of them so far (with the
exception of junicode - I may pull it in FE just to reward this) is making any
effort to free the whole font ecosystem. So as Luxi & Vera showed the fonts may
be free to use but good luck if you need a glyph not included by the original
author. Even if the license did permit modifications (usually they don't) you
don't have the same technical access as the author (unless he tells you what
expensive closed windows tool to buy).

With DejaVu anyone can ask a glyph, contribute it himself if he's in a hurry (or
if it's a low priority glyph for everyone else) or even fork DejaVu for his own
private uses. For example, if your country is defining a new currency symbol you
don't have to wait years for Bitsream to notice it.

For this reason alone FOSS project should push DejaVu over any other project
which didn't bother building a contribution ecosystem. The situation is no
longer the same it was some years ago. We don't have to beg and accept "somewhat
free" anymore

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot