While many designers are eagerly waiting for the promised FontLab update, it seems other tools are looking to challenge the status quo and redefine what it means to do font design with digital tools:
According to the abstract of this upcoming AtypI talk, a spiro-based web-based collaborative font editor is in the works and is to be released under an open source license. Which license will be chosen and how well the software will work in a self-hosted scenario and outside of a "cloud" infrastructure remains to be seen.
Looks like earlier experiments in the area like Typism have not really taken off. We'll see what happens.
Another tool taking a different approach (albeit proprietary and platform-specific) is Glyphs.
The way open font design best practises shape and support these new paradigms - and obviously the underlying licensing and collaboration culture - will be interesting.
In the meantime
apt-get install open-font-design-toolkit.