“You quoted a sentence and followed with a string of big words none of which consisted of a real argument against content of my comment.”

Right; that is what the two hundred following words were for — to justify my assertion.

“… this post has nothing to do with Mozilla … “

You work for Mozilla, the discussion was about browsers, and I speculated that perhaps it was coloring your view of the situation. I should have also noted I found your blog via this link. which perhaps put me in the mind to think this wasn’t just an unconnected thought having nothing to do with mozilla:

http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2009/07/19/thought-polution/comment-page-1/#comment-9804

“Finally, two things:”

nice echo

“… swearing in ALL CAPS was to visually show my frustration, welcome to blogging, …”

I know what it means, but I stand by my recommendation.

“… and calling out grammatical errors doesn’t make you sound smart and add to your argument it makes you sound like an asshole.”

Welcome to the internet. There’s my cute echo.

More seriously, I consider myself to be generally smart by nowhere near as smart as many other people I know and work with. That means I make mistakes, and I appreciate it when people sincerely (that is, not belittlingly) point out my errors. These recommendations were not part of my argument, which is why they were set off from everything else I wrote. Since you don’t know me nor I you, it was silly of me to assume you’d receive my recommendations in the spirit they were intended, and not a ploy to make me look smart at your expense.

You quoted a sentence and followed with a string of big words none of which consisted of a real argument against content of my comment.

I hate to repeat myself, but this post has nothing to do with Mozilla and is my own personal opinion. I thought I made this clear at the top of the article.

I’ll be preparing another blog post on the basic economics of selling web fonts to address some of your other comments.

Finally, two things: swearing in ALL CAPS was to visually show my frustration, welcome to blogging, and calling out grammatical errors doesn’t make you sound smart and add to your argument it makes you sound like an asshole.

You said, “I think the value of a font has to be put in context.” Then there was a string of sentences of arguable validity and negligible pertinence, and come to an unrelated conclusion.

You happen to work at an organization which creates free software, and has built itself a workable business model, mostly by steering search traffic to Google. The majority of firefox was written by professional engineers getting a decent salary to do so. Kudos to all of you.

But Mozilla created value by having a product superior to the market leader’s, not because it was free in either sense of the word. But currently, most of the high quality fonts are not free, and they retain their value (as much as it frustrates you and as much as you wish it was different). That will probably change in time, but not because the rest of your tool chain is free. It will change when someone figure out how to make money giving away free high quality fonts. A much less likely scenario is that a hoard of highly qualified typography geeks will spend tens of thousands of hours producing a range of high quality font families in an act of selfless giving and/or ego.

Your concluding sentence in support of the idea that a font has an intrinsically low value was, “[Font technology's] relative importance is dwarfed by the innovations around it and all of them are free.” This is a non sequitur. Say I give you a very high end exotic motorcycle, completely free and it works. Say there is a $20 part in the gear box that breaks one day and you are stuck in first gear. After searching high and low, you can’t find a source for this part. Although the rest of the motorcycle was free to you, it doesn’t make that one part less valuable, in fact, you’d probably pay top dollar to get a replacement.

“Your business model is to create fonts, once, and then license them on a per-use basis. I can’t be the first one to tell you THAT ISN’T GONNA FUCKING WORK ANYMORE.” Authors and composers do it every day. You seem to be mad about it.

Finally, two things: swearing in ALL CAPS makes you look immature, and the plural of font is “fonts,” not “font’s.”

All I’m saying is thanks to @font-face, web site owners are now a market for font sellers, just as they are a market for stock photos. It’s a disruptive change, but it’s not the obliteration you seem to be celebrating.

If every musician had to pay a license fee for every track that they used mp3, they wouldn’t use it. Vorbis would be much more popular. The IP holders that decided to extract license fees for mp3 knew this and instead opted to attempt extracting license fees from application vendors that decoded mp3.

The point I’m trying to make in this post is that tools used to create web content cannot come with licensing fees if they intend to be successful because the majority of content created with them will need to be free. The current approach of the foundries is to ask for new technologies that extend their business model in to web content, the world does not bend to them and they cannot bend to the world.

When you printed a paper using metal tiles font’s were arguably the most important instrument used in engineering the product. When this process became computerized and printed materials were produced using digital font files font’s were still an integral part of the process and final product but not the most important.

When you’re talking about font’s in the context of web content you have to think from the point of view of a content creator. This content creator is using a huge amount of amazing technology which is all open and free to create their content. In this context, a font really is “just a FONT”, it’s relative importance is dwarfed by the innovations around it and all of them are free.

I have no argument that there will be increased pressure to have open fonts (really, what most users care about is the free as in beer part). I look forward to the day when there are plentiful, free, high quality fonts to be had. To the degree that is successful, it will surely impinge on the existing revenue stream that the foundries currently rely on. I’m not sure why you are so venomous about it.

Dave said, “It’s a font … a FONT.” That is like saying, “Why in hell do people care what Shakespeare wrote? It’s just words on a page … WORDS ON A PAGE.” If people didn’t value fonts, there would be no need for the @font-face property. “Times Roman” and “Courier” would be all we would need.

Dave, I’d love to see a font that you have created. Back in the early 80s when MTV used to play music videos all day, my friends and I used to laugh at how bad most of them were … until MTV ran a segment showing videos which had been submitted in earnest which MTV decided not to run. Dave, odds are that the font you might create would have the same illuminating effect about font quality.

The vast majority of people who still made a living making fonts will not continue to be able to so anymore. The end. The can scream and complain but it ain’t going to change.

The buggy whip makers need to grow up.

mikeal and Simon, what’s “utterly infeasible” about someone selling fonts with a license to use them on a web site? I wanted to put some prose on my web site using the Linotype Palatino typeface, I’ve got money and I don’t want to pirate. How is that different from someone wanting to hear the latest Black Eyed Peas song who has money and doesn’t want to pirate? Why didn’t MP3 make all music “open and free”?

Essentially, this forces font makers into an open world – to allow your work to ever be used online is to give it free to the world, with no reasonable expectation of reward. It’s not the same situation as music/video or software, where commercial and free can compete on reasonably even terms. This simply makes the commercial side utterly infeasible.