š¹ The design community and the tech community traditionally have very different cultures. Designer culture often involves the work of a single artist-designer and insists on protecting their artwork, while software developers generally cannot operate in such a solitary fashion: their work, even if it is copyrighted, is often based on the work of others and more subject to fragmented authorship. Since fonts are software, Google Fonts works at the intersection of the two communities and, for many reasons, has embraced the Libre software culture to promote the creation, development, and distribution of typefaces. This culture encourages participation and learning while facilitating sharing and collaboration through the openness of the work and a more flexible licensing schema. It is helpful for type designers to understand the typical operation of a software project. This page aims to help type designers involved in starting or participating in Libre Font projects to know how libre software projects operate.
As part of the Open Source initiative, Libre Fonts Culture is rooted in the four freedoms of Free Software. The concept of freedom refers to more than just open availability and monetary cost but is at the core of the movement. This is the reason we use the term libre, rather than āfree,ā to avoid the unwanted associations with āfreeā as in āgratis.ā
The Four Freedoms are intended to establish and preserve the aim of giving the users the power over tools such as software or, in this case, fonts, and they also help contextualize some of the requirements.
Freedom to use and run.
As fonts are software, this refers to the freedom to use, build and install them for any purpose, in private or public, by any party, in any field or endeavor.
Freedom to study and edit.
Users should be able to study the projects unhindered, which means that the fonts should be available to their users in a complete āsource codeā form.
Freedom to contribute.
Users are encouraged to contribute, either with new projects or with modifications made to an existing project. The changes performed on the font project (whether privately or publicly) could be submitted as a contribution.
Freedom to share, redistribute and redistribute modifications.
According to Wikipedia, āOpen Source is a decentralized software-development model that encourages open collaborationā to share and learn among peers. This often implies profound changes to how a designer typically works in terms of possibilities and challenges.
Developing fonts in an open-source manner allows you to:
However:
These are some links where you could find more detailed information about this Culture: