From OFLB

OFLB Libre/Open Font Manifesto

Across the Internet, independent projects are taking place that now form a coherent Open Font Movement.

They are not joined up, and there is no central place for them to meet and discuss common plans.

A canonical catalog of Libre/Open Fonts may be a convenience center for the Open Font community. The Open Font Library can be such a catalog, and such a social focal point.

A small catalog of Open Fonts that is of notable typographic quality and champions the OpenFontLicense will attract a lot of attention from the proprietary font design community.

A larger catalog of Open Fonts will be functionally similar to a metasearch engine like http://yotophoto.com/ that trawls other repositories with a wide net, a catalog can collect Open fonts from across the web for central hosting as there are orders of magnitude less fonts than photos. But it will be much less impressive to designers.

Other Libre/Open Font Manifestos

Ellen Lupton wrote her own "Free Font Manifesto" - http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html - and presented it to the ATypI 2006 conference in Lisbon. It suffered widespread criticism, eg from Brook Elgie. There were excellent points to it but it also somewhat confused freeware-non-modifiable fonts with open fonts.

Robert Scoble, Microserf, wrote a nice essay about why fonts designed for on-screen reading are critical to the success of any operating system: http://scobleizer.com/2006/08/17/linux-achilles-heel-fonts/

While not directly font related, http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html is an interesting example of a manifesto for what became wikipedia that stylistically we might do well to borrow from.

Uses for a Libre/Open Font Manifesto

The FSF maintains a list of priority campaigns for Free Software Movement at http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html Perhaps an Open Font Manifesto that clearly highlights the need for more Libre/open Fonts, and the progress the OFLB and others are making, will help add open fonts to this list.