I'm not sure I understand the logic here. Webfonts are a thing now, which makes all kinds of fonts, both free and expensive, available for websites. How is that anything but a good thing?
Of all the things that message board copyright activists get up-in-arms about, it's hard to imagine one where they have a weaker case than typefaces. Literally nobody needs an expensive typeface; we have more high-quality free typefaces now than anyone has had... basically in all of human history.
The point is simply that if I wanted to create a website and use Circular [0] (a nice geometric font made popular by Spotify) I would need to pay based on total pageviews which is an unknown, so the price is unknown, which is prohibitive in the sense that I'm now tied to a font license that penalizes me based on the success of my website.
Or, I could use Inter which is similar, free, better (more weights, filetype options) and I don't have to worry. This goes beyond price, I really don't want another thing to worry about and a cool font isn't worth the monkey on my back.
> we have more free typefaces than ever...
That's kinda the point I'm making I guess; I believe the recent rise of all these free/open alternatives to popular established ones was precisely because of the webfont-pay-per-pageviews model.
We may just be saying the same thing. I think all I'm saying is that there doesn't seem to be anything problematic about the arrangement we've landed on.
Except that for most digital services / contents, a server is a core requirement, while any specific font isn't.
I would not going to risk something as secondary to my business as font become a runaway cost, or stop providing my service / content because of something tangentially related to what I offer. And it seems gp feels the same.
I get your point, but I don’t think Inter is similar enough to Circular to be a replacement for it. Inter is more of a San Francisco replacement in my book (which is how I use it on one of my websites—SF for Apple devices and Inter as a fallback). They’re both pretty, but Spotify’s UI looks very different than a UI set in Inter.
Tbh I was just reaching for a good "free font alternative" -- ofc they wont be exact clones -- but captures that "clean sans-serif design spirit" that seems to be all the rage at the moment.
Of all the things that message board copyright activists get up-in-arms about, it's hard to imagine one where they have a weaker case than typefaces. Literally nobody needs an expensive typeface; we have more high-quality free typefaces now than anyone has had... basically in all of human history.