Re: [GFD] Tom Phinney on Libre Fonts

On October 14, 2013 04:37:16 PM Jason Pagura wrote:
> Thomasphinney.com does have a comment section. Anything you want to say
> about this or any of his other blog posts, you can say there.

>From the ashes rise the Phoenix.
We can keep polishing the Apple until we think it's perfect, but the 
problem with this is that nobody sees what's happening until the final thing 
is open for public viewing, and by that time, we may like some aspects of 
it, but there are some other aspects that could have been handled 
differently if we had an earlier say in the direction.

Let's take FontForge as an example.
George could have kept Fontforge closed-source and out of public view until 
he got to version2012 - called it official, and then retire to do other 
things with his life, but instead of that, he chose to have it open source, 
and other people collaborated on what he had and made FontForge better than 
what he would have done if he had decided to do it all himself alone. For 
example, the benefits we see are various patches, and some rather large 
edits and files added to Fontforge - these things wouldn't have happened if 
George had gone-it-alone - and on top of all that, this would be called 
pfaedit, not FontForge.

This seems like a good read, if you're interested to see what happens when 
many people get together and collaborate despite being located in various 
parts of the globe. http://fontforge.org/ff-history.html
What you want to note from the above, is, all the additional improvements 
added by different authors, which would not have happened if George decided 
to keep polishing the apple alone all by himself.

...and for your question - Yes,there is a lot of crud out on the internet, 
but, there are things there that can be improved-upon by different sets of 
eyes. One person's garbage can be someone else's treasure.

and from the ashes rise the Phoenix.

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