FreeFontManifestos
From Open Font Library Wiki
OFLB Free Font Manifesto
Across the Internet, independent projects are taking place that now form a coherent Free 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 Free Fonts may be a convenience center for the Free Font community. The Open Font Library can be such a catalog, and such a social focal point.
A small catalog of Free 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 Free 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 Free 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 Free 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
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 Free Font Manifesto
The FSF maintains a list of priority campaigns for Free Software Movement at http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html Perhaps a Free Font Manifesto that clearly highlights the need for more Free Fonts, and the progress the OFLB and others are making, will help add Free Fonts to this list.
