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Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

Those independent companies can be eventually bought by PE and turned into more bombs, though, right?

They indeed can but licensing on fonts from most companies is perpetual. Especially from the independent traditional ones. So its possible they might be bought in future but the new owner can't change license retroactively.

Also there is very high chance they already got offer from HGGC and simply refused it, because some similar notably independent type foundries got bought recently.

What is a foundry?

Sorry. Its name for a company that designs/distributes typefaces. It is a relic from past to call it this. In the past those companies were not only designing the typefaces but also manufacturing the physical matricies that were cast from metal.

Its similar to how some people say leading to mean line height. Lead strips were used for space between lines of text.

Could it be true, the past companies, which held ownership on past products, still in a misconception about current world working, and overpricing products without considering the possible downfall?

No, type designers want their art to be used. The type industry until recently has been a fairly friendly one as only designers really cared about it.

I think it’s more likely that vulture capitalists have discovered a matket that they can ruthlessly exploit, extracting every last shred of value without giving the slightest of shits about its long term sustainability.

A company that designs fonts. In the past they cast said fonts in metal to create movable type, a foundry is a place where metal is melted and cast into various forms. A font foundry was thus a place that made the type for printing presses.

But digital don't need one. A designer can do it. But why there is a market dominance through legal license in this regard?

It's a ton of work to design a font. Any designer can do it, not any designer can do it well. It's a very small niche of overall design. That led to a few companies specializing in font design, and predictably private equity firms have been buying them out & raising prices. Customers will switch away, but this creates unexpected work to do so some might end up paying at least for a while.

You can commission a custom typeface (or a modification of an existing one from their library) and get the rights to them, so they're yours. It's expensive up front, but you own it after.

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