Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

Posted Oct 24, 2013 15:03 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576)
Parent article: Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

>The loudest critic (literally) of this position at ATypI was Bruno Maag of type foundry Dalton Maag, whom many will remember was commissioned to create the open Ubuntu Font. Maag vociferously criticized Google Fonts during the audience-question portion of the second panel, saying that Google was reported to pay a flat fee of $6500 for a font family; creating such a family required 400 hours of work, he said, so "how can Google expect someone to earn a living at $15 per hour." There was applause from many sections of the audience.

Well, I have to respect the quality of his work, because the Ubuntu font family is the best free font family by a margin wide enough to drive a truck^Wgalactic supercluster through.

This attitude however, is seriously offensive, to be honest. Leave aside that he's talking about an amount of money that would be considered absurdly aspirational for the majority of the world's population (that's roughly the median hourly wage in the US, one of the highest in the world) - is Google forcing people at gunpoint? Are people accepting Google's offer because otherwise something nasty will happen to their family? Or are people accepting that offer because they find it an acceptable trade?

Sounds like the guy's just a self-centred asshole, to be honest.

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Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

Posted Oct 24, 2013 16:45 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (6 responses)

A bit of a digression but just to expand on the general case of this point

> Are people accepting Google's offer because otherwise something nasty will happen to their family?

Absurdly low wages and abusive work conditions are often accepted by people who are poor because the alternative is something nasty happening to their family, eviction, starvation, etc. This is often called "wage slavery" because of the similarities in work conditions.

In this case $15/hr is low, although it could technically be worse, and the reason that Maag is angry is that this is a wage appropriate for unskilled labor and it devalues the time and expertise it takes to make a high quality font family. It is implicitly insulting. You should be paying not just for the hours it takes to create the one artifact but the 10000 hours of learning it takes to achieve the skill to create the artifact.

Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

Posted Oct 24, 2013 18:48 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

the thing is they are offering this to people who have no current linkage with google, so you cannot accuse google of being an abusive employer in this case.

Google is saying that they are willing to pay that much for a Font. If nobody is willing to sell to them at that price, they won't buy any Fonts. People are perfectly free to either not spend the time creating the Font and make more money doing something else, or build the Font and sell it to someone else. Selling to Google is entirely their option.

This isn't abusive any more than me advertising that I want to buy a 2014 Chevy Cruz Diesel (MSRP $25K) for $15K. If someone takes me up on it you can't say that I'm using them as a wage slave, it's entirely their choice.

Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

Posted Oct 24, 2013 22:19 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (4 responses)

> This isn't abusive any more than me advertising that I want to buy a 2014 Chevy Cruz Diesel (MSRP $25K) for $15K. If someone takes me up on it you can't say that I'm using them as a wage slave, it's entirely their choice.

In this case what you purchase is probably stolen, that would be the most likely explanation of someone selling far below cost.

> People are perfectly free to either not spend the time creating the Font and make more money doing something else ...

That presumes a substantial social safety net such that people only need to work by choice and have free choice of the location they live and the jobs which are available. None of those things are true or free.

In any event in this case we are talking about a professional who is pointing out that, in their opinion, the offer made devalues the time of any professional who accepts. Is it wrong for someone to have that opinion and to point that out?

Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

Posted Oct 25, 2013 0:06 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

well, the MSRP and the price that you actually pay for a car actually have very little to do with each other, $15K for a $25K MSRP car is not that far out of reason :-)

as for the rest of it, are you saying that Google is the only company in the world that these people can sell Fonts to? Remember that we aren't talking about Google making these people full-time employees in any google office or anything like that, this is the price that google has offered to pay third parties if they choose to sell their Fonts to google. It in no way forces people to live anywhere or prevents them from working for anyone else.

as for "it's not enough to live on", lots of people in the world, and even in the US live on that amount. It may not be what _you_ want to live on, and if so, just don't build a font with the intention of selling it to Google.

The "company store" and "wage slave" situations are only real when people don't have a choice. There is no place in the world where you have no choice but to work for Google.

Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

Posted Oct 25, 2013 3:44 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> The "company store" and "wage slave" situations are only real when people don't have a choice. There is no place in the world where you have no choice but to work for Google.

True enough. It was a pleasure talking with you, I don't have anything more to add. Have a nice night. 8-)

Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

Posted Oct 25, 2013 12:23 UTC (Fri) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link]

> as for "it's not enough to live on", lots of people in the world, and even in the US live on that amount. It may not be what _you_ want to live on, and if so, just don't build a font with the intention of selling it to Google.

The point, I suppose, is that font designers want to be well paid by first world standards for their work, which Google is potentially undermining by offering so much less than the market previously has done.

> The "company store" and "wage slave" situations are only real when people don't have a choice. There is no place in the world where you have no choice but to work for Google.

True, but as Google operate one of the largest font repositories they certainly will have an impact on the price others will be willing to pay for fonts. So choice still exists, but it may be that the offer wherever you go will be diminished as a result of Google's policies.

Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

Posted Oct 28, 2013 12:22 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>In any event in this case we are talking about a professional who is pointing out that, in their opinion, the offer made devalues the time of any professional who accepts. Is it wrong for someone to have that opinion and to point that out?

Yes, it is wrong for someone to point that out *in the manner described*.

Saying "come on guys, that's not a fair offer" is perfectly fine (although it's possibly factually incorrect - if enough of the market chooses to accept a value, then by definition that *is* its market value, however much you wish it weren't).

Choosing to phrase it in such a way that it appears to have been deliberately intended to insult around 6.8 *billion* people is just being an asshole.

Web fonts, open source, and industry disruption

Posted Oct 27, 2013 17:35 UTC (Sun) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

Yes, expecting to be (adequately) paid seems to offend many recently.