2. Typefaces have a value. If they didn't people would be content just using Arial.
3. People that do this work should be compensated.
4. Trying to figure out a solution to this problem, both from a customers and creators view is more beneficial than the "fuck this, fuck that" rhetoric in the blog post.
His point is that the commercial model has an enormous number of technical issues. Clearly, free fonts provide value in their technical superiority that overrides any aesthetic superiority of commercial fonts.
2. Operating Systems have a value. If they didn't people would be content just using punch cards.
3. People that do this work should be compensated.
4. Trying to figure out a solution to this problem, both from a customers and creators view is more beneficial than the "fuck this, fuck that" rhetoric among linux nerds.
I apologize for the snark. My point is that there's a striking similarity here. There are some arguments that Windows is superior to Linux, and once upon a time, those arguments might've been valid. They're not any more. It's crazy these days to plunk down $300 for Vista when Ubuntu is better, and free in every way.
Quantity leads to quality—even if the average free font is much worse than the average proprietary font, a few of them will be very good, and will gain a lot of usage.
There may still be a place for proprietary fonts. But the web will embrace the more open option. If the foundries want a piece of that action, they're going to have to change the way they do things.
Quantity does not lead to quality - if it did everyone would be using open source web design. Why are they not?
I don't know those numbers, but I think that's the important question (rather than just Windows vs. Ubuntu).
So web usage is comparable, but Vista seems to be well ahead. At the same time I suspect that deployments are quite a bit different than web usage, so take that with a grain of salt.
The w3counter.com numbers are 2% and 5%. Both single digits (hint).
There are whole companies out there doing engineering work on Linux, except for a few odd laptops. Actually, site http proxies may cause Unix web undercount (i.e. stats are dominated by home access, presumably with lower Unix use).
There are indeed whole companies out there doing engineering work on Linux; I've worked with some of them. But they are a tiny fraction of all companies, and the desktops in most companies run Windows. Of those that don't, I'm sure Linux has had a few big successes, but Apple sells all those computers to someone. As I said, I've never seen a study that puts Linux even close. If you've got more up-to-date information that is actually representative, go ahead and share it, but please don't pretend that the server log from a random web site is a real study.
MacOSX user here btw, not a desktop linux zealot at all, just reporting what I see anecdotally.
The best thing MS could do for linux is perfect its anti-piracy strategy. If it was impossible to pirate Windows, Linux would explode I reckon.
2. Classical music recordings have a value.
3. People that play classical music should be compensated.
I think this whole @font-face (1) thing is exactly what is needed to shake some sense into the foundries. Designers will start using the fonts they love, without needing to create a graphic, then the foundries will start freaking out and (hopefully) innovate new, standards-based methods of using a designer-chosen font without sacrificing the usage rights of said font.
As a slightly different argument, using a font via @font-face is no different than using a graphic. Graphics can have usage permissions associated with them just like a font, so why do we need to invent a new means of distributing licensed fonts?
Innovation can only do what is possible. If the font foundries want it to be physically impossible to "steal" the font, there is simply no way to square that with making the font available over the web for the purpose of rendering it, without sacrificing too much usability to make it worth doing. Maybe IE can do it (although even then only dangerously, if you want it to be really secure), but there's no way to make it possible for Firefox, KHTML, and other open source browsers to use the font, but impossible to download it. They're just too open for that. And any solution based on leaving them out in the cold is rapidly becoming infeasible as IE may still have market share, but is very nearly the last closed-source browser of any significant still standing.
Leave the handwaving of "innovative" solutions to impossible problems to the government.
It would probably suffice to develop a standard where only an embedded subset of the font was transmitted by the web server, so you couldn't just download and install the .otf file or equivalent. That would probably save a worthwhile amount of bandwidth with modern fonts and their huge file sizes, too.
As it stands right now, you do, because the font foundries won't stand for anything less. If they were happy with probabilities they would have been in the game a long time ago.
Note this is a social thing, not a technical thing.