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The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensingThe Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensingPosted Oct 14, 2010 2:27 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)Parent article: The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing
simply examining the names, a user would have no idea that the DejaVu family is related to Liberation. Which is fine because the DejaVu family is not related to Liberation. It is a derivative of the Bitstream Vera family. Says so right on the project page.. Vera was donated to the free software community by Bitstream under the condition that derivatives be renamed. Liberation's goal was not so much professional appearance as size-wise compatibility with the usual Windows fonts: Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New. The Liberation Serif, Sans and Mono fonts are meant to be drop-in replacements for these, but look quite different (and, to my eyes, quite poor). Meanwhile, the article entirely fails to mention Vera, which was the first professional-quality display font set available under a (more or less) free licence on Linux/X11. (Print quality postscript fonts were available, but displayed poorly on the screen.) It is a rather sloppy article by LWN standards.
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The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 14, 2010 14:37 UTC (Thu) by n8willis (editor, #43041) [Link]
Yeah, that got accidentally linked together from a previously longer discussion of the other commissioned-from-commercial-foundry fonts. The point, however, remains exactly the same: the older fonts were designed, released, then official development on them just stopped. Vera included.
That is the part that makes Ubuntu's -- and DM's -- ongoing development plan different; they are continuing to add scripts and community-developed glyphs.
Moving forward, the decision to continue to develop the UFF is what distinguishes it from Vera -- as well as Droid, Liberation, and the others in that category, which used the deliver-once-then-forget model. For all the general talk about the ills of proprietary software houses dumping code "over the wall" it's puzzling why the FLOSS community took it for granted that it should accept fonts in the same manner.
Nate
The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 14, 2010 15:42 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Vera, Liberation etc continues to get updates fairly frequently. Not sure what the complaint is all about. More details please.
The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 14, 2010 16:00 UTC (Thu) by n8willis (editor, #43041) [Link]
You can check their glyph coverage in Fontmatrix or Fontaine and see for yourself.
Example: LiberationSans-Regular.ttf today - 655 character count. LiberationSans-Regular.ttf 1.03.90 from 2008 (oldest available package at https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liberation-fonts/) - 662.
Vera today: 256. Vera in 2003 (via http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera...): 256.
Nate
The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 15, 2010 6:39 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Liberation does have a increase. It is open for contributions. Instead of Vera, look at Dejavu. Noone uses Vera anymore.
The Ubuntu font and a fresh look at open font licensing Posted Oct 15, 2010 13:34 UTC (Fri) by Quazatron (guest, #4368) [Link]
I didn't find it sloppy at all, it just had a small bug. You should have sent a patch against the article instead of complaining. :-)
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