Re: Fonts from the former fonts.openlilylib.org

[Andrew Bernard]

Hi Abraham,

I sympathise with your employment redundancy and the issues it creates, and understand this as a rationale for you re-licensing your fonts under a commercial licence. While there is nothing wrong with that, I wonder if you have done your market research on this? How many people are likely to buy your fonts in absolute terms? It is hard to imagine that there will be large numbers, hence this project may only generate a small trickle of cash flow. And already it seems to be somewhat alienating the open source users, as judged by the activity of this thread.

As a committed open source proponent, and long term user of Linux, I do not use proprietary software on my Linux systems, as a matter of principle (see the Debian philosophy for more details). So even if proprietary lilypond fonts came along, I would not purchase them in any case. There are many hundreds of thousands of Linux users who share the same viewpoint – take a look at the numbers of downloads of Debian. Some people may not be so strict, but this should enter into your considerations.

So perhaps your market is FInale and Sibelius users instead, or Windows lilypond users. Again, I wonder if the demand is there to make it commercially viable?

Many highly regarded typographers producing fonts that can take up to five years or more of difficult labour to perfect often find difficulty making an income from sales of even the finest fonts, unless the typeface acquires a certain popularity with designers or cult status, but this is not the norm. To overcome this, many designers will now offer several faces of a family for free. Given that Finale and Sibelius come with fonts out of the box that most users seem satisfied with (indeed most users who are satisfied with FInale and Sibelius output do not seem to me to be very discriminating about fine engraving… [sorry!]) again I wonder where your actual market may lie? Given that music fonts are a very highly micro-specialised niche area compared to text fonts, it seems problematic to me.

Just some thoughts. Not meaning to sound negative, but rather, adding some realism.

Having said that, allow me to publicly praise and thank you for your outstanding work on your very fine fonts, full of subtlety and nuance, and making them available for use in lilypond.

Andrew