🦉 The design community and the tech community traditionally have very different cultures. Designer culture often involves the work of a single artist-designer that usually prefers to protect 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 Movement 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 “free,” to avoid the unwanted associations with “free” as in “gratis.”
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 ‘source code’ 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.
Challenges and Opportunities
According to Wikipedia, “Open Source is a decentralized software-development model that encourages open collaboration” to share and learn among peers. This often implies profound changes to how a designer typically works in terms of possibilities and challenges.
Some of the main opportunities
Developing fonts in an open-source manner allows you to:
Meet people with similar interests.
Receive feedback from other participants or contributors.
Improve your skills.
Learn from others.
Build stronger projects based on the reviews received.
Some of the most common challenges
However:
Working in the open also requires a sense of openness: to work under a different workflow or set of requirements, to work in the public eye, and to embrace new ways of handling and solving issues.
Open Source developers need to consider others’ needs, whether those others are further contributors, developers, users, or editors.
This working method often requires new tools, such as a Version Control System (VCS) such as git, to help manage the process.
Open Source developers must be open to receiving bug reports from other participants or contributors.
You are encouraged to work with free software to develop your project.
Ideally, you would incorporate the practices of Continuous Integration testing and proofing.
Expectations
What does this mean for you?
You should expect that there will be future contributions to your font, and that these contributions may come from other users. Your sense of “ownership” over the font may differ from that of other projects you have been involved with.
We expect your font development to take place in a GitHub repository from the earliest stages. In general, this repository should be public; if you wish to keep the repository private until launch, we expect you to invite members of the Google Fonts team as collaborators.
We expect you to check in and publish your in-progress work incrementally - for a commissioned project, we expect to see check-ins at least at the end of each working day, if not after each substantive change - rather than as one final deliverable.
All Google Fonts projects must be built using a reproducible, libre toolchain. We do not onboard binaries exported from font editors. See the Build the fonts chapter to learn more about how we expect fonts to be built.
Useful links
These are some links where you could find more detailed information about this Culture: