I'm not sure you understand the sheer scale of the task that is creating a good font set. Professionals often spend years going from an idea to a full font family with a good glyph complement, and it's not getting any easier now that internationalised character sets and OpenType wizardry are the norm rather than a bonus.
I'm not underestimating the amount of effort it takes to create a good typeface. I'm saying that the market value of making one of your faces free/embeddable is likely to be high enough that at least a few indies (not "open source" font dorks, but people like David Březina, who don't have a permanent home at FF or HFJ or Adobe) will release their work --- because why not?
That's basically the same as the "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" argument. I won't hold my breath. Open source end-user products always seem to improve at a snails pace.
There are enough differences that I don't think your analogy holds water. One could just as well use the analogy of linking to Wikipedia as a citation rather than some proprietary site behind a paywall. The former has clearly won in the general case.
Well, go check out the fonts. Some of them are nice. I'll use them.
People do actually upgrade their browsers these days. The browsers yell at them if they don't. The next versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE all support it. It's only a year or so off (probably less if you don't wait for IE6/7 to go away.)
No, lets be realistic. They will be crappy, they will be everywhere, they will define people's expectations of "what a font is". It's like Ikea versus hand-carved artisan furniture, the real stuff just doesn't compare, but nobody you're likely to meet could afford it, and the bolt-together ticky-tacky does the job (or fails, but people are so used to the fail they work around it).
dudes, get real. I can read the web just fine. Who cares about this? There isn't even enough resolution on my screen to tell the difference between a good font and a great one.
This reminds me of when drummers got all weepy because of drum machines. When your scene is done, it's time to gracefully exit the stage.
There isn't even enough resolution on my screen to tell the difference between a good font and a great one.
A decade ago, when 1024x768 on a 17" monitor was doing OK and high quality icons were 32x32 in 256 colours, they might have said the same thing. Today, screens with twice that pixel count aren't unusual, and everyone from operating systems to web sites is using much more detailed icons.
By the same token, low resolution screens are one of the places where the difference between a good font and a great font really stands out. It's not the same difference you'd see on paper out of a 2400dpi printer. In fact, the qualities that make a font good for screen use are quite different to those that make a font good for print use. But to maximise the visual appeal and, more importantly, the legibility and readability of text on screen in a world where on-screen reading is increasingly taking over from other media, we need people who understand how to achieve the best results with what precious screen real estate we have.
Alas, as with most things in graphic design and typography, good work is rarely noticed because it's good work, while bad work is rarely noticed because people don't know the difference (but still read slower, make more mistakes, and get tired sooner).
People who didn't know graphical design learned it to do web pages. Perhaps people who don't know typographical design will learn it to do fonts in web pages?
