raph points out that free software has been unable to produce any good fonts. I would debate this point rather heavily. something we needed for berlin was a font which took to task the unicode character set and attempted to cover all of it with a single, simple typeface. just as a fallback, in case the user needed to see some text for a language which hadn't many professional font designers. unifont is the only such font, proprietary or free, which has done so. it did so at the expense of the much hyped glyph <-> character distinction. it did so at the expense of smooth, silky vectors. it did so at the expense of existing font formats. yet at the same time, it did what nobody else on the market had the guts to do, yet what billions of non-english speakers could really make use of.

this to me is the essence of free software. it's not wine-and-cheese yacht-faring upper crust software. it's not the stuff which spoils you with compliments and charm, wows you with the immense cost of their outfit, only to turn their back on you if you happen to be poor. free software doesn't have time for compliments and charm.

I am genuinely proud of the fact that my computer comes with more compilers, more documentation, more databases, more libraries, more editors, more tools, more network clients and servers, and more source code than I will ever see in a million years of watching adobe's product line. I am proud that this software has taught me to be a programmer, and came under a license encouraging me to train others to be programmers. I am proud that I can go online at any time of day or night and see a legion of people on mailing lists and IRC teaching newbies to be respectable programmers with good technical problem solving skills, liberating people from the intellectual enslavement of the "software market". I am proud that we spend our free time working on things we see a real need for, or things we simply find too beautiful to not work on. if we ever stopped, we would be done for.

(5 days till frances gets here. 5 days..)