On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Greg Grossmeier <[email protected]> wrote:
> There's a lot of changes in Typography Refresh. One of the many is the
> font css rule. The majority are changes that do not implicate the
> Freeness of anything. The font does. The font change (originally) only
> had a benefit to Mac OS users (right?).
>
No.
> Now the font change (after
> Ryan's amazing work, which should have been done at the beginning) it
> includes a benefit for people who will now get Liberation instead of
> DejaVu (right?).
>
> So, if my two (right?)'s above are correct, that makes me feel like the
> design team only cared about OSX/iOS users before, and only after a LOT
> of complaining on the various lists and bugs and such did they put in
> the effort to see IF they could improve the experience for non-Apple
> products.
>
Again no. We tested on Linux systems starting months ago, with the
developers who have been working on this. Several of our iterations were
focused on trying out free/open fonts to put first, and getting feedback
about that.
> I find it also corroborated by the request from a Design team
> member for access to a Windows computer to do testing on *last week*.
>
Vibha asked for a Windows machine because she does not normally do testing
on Windows herself, as a designer. The developers and product managers do
this testing, and we all sit down (or share screenshots remotely) to take a
look. Kaldari, who was working with Vibha at the time, doesn't trust
virtual machine-based testing of fonts. That's why they asked for a Windows
machine.
> That may or may not be an accurate way to describe the situation,
> historically, but that's how the narrative can easily be interpreted and
> it is what I'm feeling from these discussions where I'm being told my
> preference for not promoting proprietary stuff is "irrational."
>
This is not an accurate or fair representation. This kind of attitude ("all
designers care about is OSX") is the kind of pernicious meme that drives
good designers away from working on free software projects. It's akin to
saying "women don't participate in $free_project because they aren't
interested in working on free software".
Why on god's green earth would a large, talented, and experienced team of
designers come to work here if they didn't care about software and content
freedom? Or that they didn't care about their work being widely accessible
on all platforms? You think they did it because they love taking a pay cut?
Or they love putting a project on their resume that has the same reputation
that Craigslist does when it comes to lack of good design? Please assume
some more good faith. These people know what they are doing, and they all
made sacrifices to come and work here on Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki.
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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