Let’s say there is this market called “web content creators” and we are trying to sell them a product, a font. We want to sell them something that is going help make their web content a little better.

A really good way to sell them something would be to compare the dollar value of our product to the increased dollar value that will be added to their final product. Damn, their final product is free. Scratch that.

Since there is some labor and tools cost to creating their product we could compare our superior *professionally* created product to all the other tools they are using. Hrm…. it turns out all the tools and technologies used to create web content are pretty impressive and at a very low cost if not completely free.

Alright, let’s just hope these guys really like fonts. Let’s research the price of fonts of comparative quality and price our fonts below theirs. Uh oh, it turns out there are a lot of great quality free fonts to choose from already and it’s increasing every day.

In this market creating a font once and selling it a number of times does not seem like a smart business model. Maybe an alternative business model is more suited to this market.

There **are** other business models for individual font creators. The amount of people that **can** use newly created fonts is now increasing exponentially. Surely the creation of new custom fonts will still get some business as long as you’re willing to give them the font in an open format they can use anywhere.

Maybe the revenues aren’t enough to sustain an office and a half a dozen employees but it’s certainly enough for freelance font creators. I know a few web content creators that would love a one-on-one relationship with a font author and would pay a decent stipend for a custom tailored font.

Font creators will be fine. Font creation is sure to increase. But maybe the institutions that used to house font creation, “the foundries”, don’t have a sustainable model in this market.

I’m about to go on a tear so it’s worth saying that all of what I’m writing are my own opinions and in no way whatsoever reflect the opinions or policies of my employer.

Any new technology can have a side effect of making an entire industry irrelevant. Every time an industry is on the brink they try to plead for their own survival. Their tone and message is predictable, “you’ll miss our profession when it’s gone”. But of course, the profession never disappears only the institutions that used to enable it which are no longer relevant. These Institutions cannot survive in a new world so they scream to save their business model and claim that their profession is what is at risk.

I love journalism, and music, and I’m a total font geek but I just can’t stand newspapers, record labels, and these god forsaken font ["foundries"](http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2009/07/19/broken-record/).

Let me get this straight. 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**.

@font-face has the side effect of invalidating your whole business model by driving demand for ubiquitous free and open fonts. I’m sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. The world is cruel, and you’re fucked.

Print publications bought your fonts because they had fairly high production costs already and adding a little on top wasn’t going to break them. But this is the web, content is ubiquitous and free so the tools to create it have to be ubiquitous and free as well.

To steal a little from [Clay Shirky](http://www.shirky.com/), your industry is now going to suffer from mass-amatuerization. Font creation will not die with the foundries, there is going to be more font creation than there ever has been in human history, it’s just going to be open and free. The cost of producing a font is nearly zero. There is labor involved but the tools are ubiquitous and mostly free while distribution is a non-issue. Now that **anyone** can create a font and quality is determined solely by the creators talent, and we can actually **use** open fonts in the web content we create, it is safe to expect an explosion in the creation of fonts.

There is no technology that can save your business model because it pre-dates the web. The web changed the world you live in and you don’t get to change it back. If you don’t believe me you should have a chat with some former stock photographers.

I’m not lucky enough to get to choose one source control manager and use it exclusively. On a daily basis I use git, svn, and hg. Every week or so I also use bzr. Luckily, I no longer have to touch darcs.

I haven’t dug in to the internals of these tools enough to say which one has the superior technical merits although I will say that I’ve never seen a git conflict resolution interface even across unbelievably hairy merges.

I write a lot of small libraries and a couple big ones. I care far more about the social effects and contribution workflows a tool provides than any other features. There are different public web applications that try and provide infrastructure for the social effects of DCVS and after months of working with different approaches I have to say that GitHub is the winner by a mile.

At the end of the day there are two factors that make GitHub such a clear winner. The first is zero friction publishing. The second is the democratizing effect of scraping any notion of a “central” repository.

Nearly a year ago i hit the Google Code project limit and had to call in some favors to get the limit pushed up for my account. I have to push lots of small libraries so having a simple and seamless publishing of repositories has made my life much easier. The fact that I can just push my repository and worry about turning that repo on GitHub into a “project” later, instead of the other way around, means that I have no reason **not** to publish every little thing I do.

The second and more controversial feature of GitHub, and possibly of git itself, is that there is never a clear central repository. There is my repository, and your repository, and every other **person’s** repository. This throws off FLOSS projects that have always relied on a “committer” hierarchy to manage the influx of work in to a project. Nearly every book on community driven open source focuses on the creation of a class of contributors with special write permissions to the repository. There has been a huge discussion on how to translate that process to DCVS and some tools, in particular hg, make it fairly easy to simulate older workflows with a central repository.

After living with GitHub for a while and seeing the potential for new collaboration I think the answer to translating the “committer” model to DCVS is to **not translate it at all**. GitHub makes **everyone** a committer and that enables a new class of contribution that the old model totally excluded.

Since code can travel seamlessly through different developer’s repositories each change takes on a life of it’s own. People who made what they thought were small changes for their own personal use easily share them with other developers and those changes can move around repositories hopefully making it in to an official release. New contributors don’t have to worry about this giant wall of process behind getting a patch in, they simply write the patch and push it, send pull requests to other relevant contributors and module owners eventually getting those changes pushed up in to the repository that gets packaged and distributed.

Someone is always going to be responsible for releasing a product, someone owns the keys to the distribution mechanisms, so I find the notion that some amount of authority over the project’s direction is lost by not centralizing the repository to be exaggerated. Although there is some authority that is lost to the previously defined class of committers the democratization of write permissions encourages a bigger class of lost contribution that is excluded by the laborious process of patches in bugs and the required upstream process to get the work committed. This also means that a number of contributors can live with changesets for an extended period of time before they get packaged in a release which increases confidence in large changesets that many projects reject outright for fear of instability.

GitHub solves the social problems of open source collaboration by taking a much more anarchist approach to the contribution process and while this is certainly shaking the foundation of traditional contribution models I’m loving it

We have a lot of great operating systems out there but they were all created before the web and high performance 3D gaming. To try and move technology forward I am announcing the Duke Nukem Operating System.

Duke Nukem OS is a lightweight high performance open source operating system. The first release, codename “Forever”, is due out in late 2010. A promotional comic book will accompany the release and to insure it is available by the delivery date I plan to hire [Kevin Smith](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Smith) and [Alex Ross](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Ross) to write and illustrate it.

Although no screenshots, specifications, or source code will be available until release consider this a call to action for the open source community to get involved in the project.

This new operating system will be built on the Linux kernel but I will be throwing out the bloated window managers Linux is currently known for and building a next generating interface. I’ll be using XULRunner, the Mozilla runtime used to create Firefox, as the basis for this window manager but the tools to develop applications are exclusively web3.0 “semantic web” standards. [RDFa](http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/), a next generation semantic markup language known for it’s simplicity and rapid rate of adoption, will be the primary language for building in this next generation operating system.

More updates in the future.

I’m in London for the next few days and would love to grab a drink with any community members be you Mozilla, CouchDB, Python, Windmill, JavaScript or just plain old coffee, whisky or beer geeks