On 10/15/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte(a)infodisiac.com> wrote: DejaVu is a truly free (BSDish + PD) collaboratively developed high quality font which is suitable for system wide use. It is already the default font on most popular Linux distributions. http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page The coverages of code 2000 and DejaVu are not identical. Given that the font is distributed for a small fee it is not unlikely that we could get it freed fairly cheaply. However, I believe it would be foolish for us to spend money freeing a font without collaborating with the DejaVu folks. As it stands today, code2000 is not really suitable for use as a system wide font on most desktops: it doesn't have broad typeface support and doesn't have high quality hinted latin coverage. I think this brings up an important issue: If we start paying people for content which was created mostly not for profit but is distributed with a nuisance license (cc-by-nc-nd for example, or distributed as $5 shareware to a small market)... Do we not risk creating a situation where people are rewarded for not completely freeing their content when they would otherwise without our program? Where people will instead lobby their friends with authority in the WMF to kick them money.. Do we not risk insulting the rest of our contributors who give us valuable works without an expectation of compensation? I think that if we get the funding to make an impact we should be careful to spend it on: 1) Things which further our educational mission the most: I think a font might qualify, but only if we could reasonably expect people to accept it as the default font in their browsers... but on the other hand, "all of U2's albums" would be nifty but not really furthering our goals. 2) Things which would be the most difficult to replace without the funding: A $5 shareware font which has huge overlap with an existing free content project does not fair well on this criteria. How about recordings of out of copyright (i.e. classical) music? The only rights holder should be whomever recorded it and whomever they signed agreements with in order to be permitted to record it. There are a number of small record labels such as [[Nimbus Records]] as well as the concert halls themselves which have large libraries of music. I think this would only be worthwhile as a funded endeavor if it could land us a truly massive archive which would enable us to illustrate a majority of our articles on long-dead composers.