Still, it's free beer money, and a good enough way to distribute work to the public domain.
It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community.
You would be surprised how helpful it is to simply offer design insights for free. A lot of projects are maintainted by programmers who have zero design notions and who are not even aware of the little things.
Offering a free mockup to an open-source project is also very valuable.
After a quick search I've just discovered opensourcedesign.net which I'll definitely look at contributing to. This would be great for designers portfolios http://opensourcedesign.net/jobs
So the tendency ends up being that a lot of projects just stay small and go out of their way not to grow, even when they address a problem that demands more scope than they have.
My suggestion given all of that is to not give up, but focus your design energies on the inspirational: if you produce mockups and prototypes that are hugely compelling, someone will come out of the woodwork to realize some of them: you may not know which ones or when, but you're giving them footholds in approaching the problem.
Very interesting point about inspirational mockups, definitely food for thought!
Jade had to rename. They picked 'Pug' and needed a logo. christopherdowson asks if anyone can propose a logo and ends up creating the final logo.
Pretty neat thread IMO.
Typefaces are exempt from copyright in most countries AFAIK. Only the actual font file ("computer program") and name (trademark) are restricted.
Forcing an open source project to pay roughly $200 for a one time use is a bad decision. Using such a typeface in a logo is a poor choice because that mean you can't embed it easily for free on the product's website (let's say to use as the font of your titles or to use text on the logo instead of using an image). The problem with embedding a font on a website is that by doing so you are not "using" the font but "redistributing" it.
In the end they used Arvo which was a really good choice, they were able to easily use it all over https://pugjs.org
(For example, I could use a bit of help later this year from someone with a UI/UX/web background.)