Comment by cytzol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cytzol | Hacker News Reader

> What I like about these foundries is that they have permissive licenses that are just a one-time purchase. When I make a website I don’t want to worry about the font licensing for years.

I love the work of professional typographers, but tend to stay away from commercial Web fonts, because they like to include very restrictive terms in the font licences.

For example, you're only allowed to back up Klim fonts once, which we all know is no backup at all (https://klim.co.nz/licences/web-fonts/):

> You may make one (1) copy of the Web Fonts for back-up purposes only.

And I hope you don't take a week-long holiday away from your computer:

> At Klim’s request, You agree to provide an audit to confirm the Web Fonts You are consuming match Your Sales Receipt. Klim will give You at least 5 business days’ notice to complete the audit.

The Commercial licence is a bit better, but doesn't let you subset the fonts, which means your fonts might be 5 to 10 times as big as they should be, giving your users a worse experience (https://commercialtype.com/licenses/web):

> 10. You may not modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or alter, the Webfonts, the Font Software or the designs embodied therein.

I recommend using fonts under the SIL Open Font License, where you don't have to worry about this crap.

Anyway, nice work! I've been meaning to learn Svelte, and your site looks really good.

There is a font tool/service that unites many commercial fonts from small type shops under the same license.

https://www.fontown.com

Another one with a greater selection but variable licenses:

https://fontstand.com/

I really appreciate the amount of work that goes into making a font. On one hand, these typographers and their foundries are starving for revenue and on the other hand they make the customer's professional life incredibly difficult with the retrictions that you mention.

Most small foundries have been bought out by Monotype and their licensing is now 100% subscription only. I was lucky to have purchased Univers and a couple of other fonts under their "Creative" license which bundled everything under a reasonable price.

Font foundries - listen up, if you want people to pay for your fonts, make the licensing model straight up simple - download fonts and off you go. Turns out that most people that are willing to pay for your font arent the ones trying to pirate them. Stop fucking them over.

There have been a few fonts I was interested in until I saw the several-hundred dollar bill and the license that basically restricted any useful application of the font. No wonder why startups commission their own fonts these days, so they can own them.

Typography and calligraphy is an art form so it does justify the expense, but you've got to be able to actually use it.

I think it really depends on foundries. For klim and commercial type are example of famous, older, established foundries. There are many foundries with more permissive licenses. For example fonts.floriankarsten.com has weblicense that is not tied to domain but only total monthly views with generous 50k month its perfect for many small and hobby projects especially of some other project pays for license. I have feeling the type market is going to be really disrupted by new small foundries. There just too many newcomers and it became quite a bit easier technically to make fonts.

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