Ah, I can breathe a bit easier. Finished up one consulting job and sent an invoice. Now I can turn my attention to all the other consulting jobs I'm a bit behind on :)

I spent a bit of time looking at Adobe's new OpenType fonts. Wow. There is some amazing work that's gone into those.

Not to sound like a broken record, but I think it's a damn fine thing that the designers of those fonts are getting paid for their work. This is a golden age of font design, and it wouldn't be happening if there weren't copyright protection for the fonts, and if it weren't for the legal right of companies to demand payment for the use of the font.

Seeing beautiful work like this causes me to question my involvement in free software - what we're doing in terms of fonts is so pitiful and ugly by comparison, it's not funny. The fact that the free software model can't directly compensate people for their development work is one of the worst things that's broken about the model.

Of course, this is fonts. For software that makes up the computing infrastructure, the usual proprietary software model is even more broken, giving as it does incentive to produce complex, bad, buggy stuff. I really wish there were a better model. I don't know what it would look like, though.

I'll be at LWCE Wednesday and Thursday next week. I'm not looking forward to the show at all, though. I wouldn't be going at all if it weren't for the fact that there are going to be quite a few people there I really want to meet. For the organizers, it's obviously just another trade show, with no concept at all about what makes free software unique. I will doing a small, modest, low-tech hack. If you're going too, let me know and you can join in as well!