Comment by lolinder

Comment by lolinder a day ago

55 replies

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Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn expensive.

If you can't afford the license for the font, your app is small-time enough that you can make do with one of the many, many high-quality fonts that are available for free, there's no need to pirate it. If your app is big enough that the difference matters, then you can likely afford the sticker price.

gkoberger a day ago

No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.

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  • gobengo a day ago

    op isn't saying you shouldn't complain. op is saying you shouldn't steal instead of complaining

    Reply View 14 replies
    • gkoberger a day ago

      I think there's some confusion in who is responding to whom, then. I never said anything about piracy, but the person responding to me may have confused me with the top-level comment.

      All I have done is defend the importance of typography, and never mentioned piracy or stealing.

      Reply View 13 replies
      • dcow a day ago

        Typography is important. So important that we have really good looking fonts available for free. And a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats. Guaranteed.

        Reply View 12 replies
  • tptacek a day ago

    No, those things aren't comparable. Truffles have a functional role in a dish. A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document, compared to the high-quality freely-available alternatives. This is like complaining about some kind of specially-carved or dyed truffle.

    Reply View 27 replies
    • gkoberger a day ago

      I respect you a ton (genuinely, I think you're the most interesting writer in the tech space), but you have a profound misunderstanding of the importance of typography if you think the only reason you'd need a paid typeface is the same reason you'd need a Hermes bag. I know you're a curious person, so hopefully you take this as an opportunity to open your horizons on the importance of it.

      Reply View 16 replies
      • tptacek a day ago

        I'm a typeface nerd. Bringhurst is one of 3 books on the end-table next to me right now. I spend a stupid amount of money for Hoefler fonts for my dumb blog.

        This to me is like the Menswear Guy on Twitter, who will explain in very great detail to you why the Hermès product is significantly better than the generic alternative. He's right, but he also understands that you buy the Hermès product to make a statement. Spend money on that statement if you want --- I do --- but don't try to pretend you have a right to it.

        (i don't mean i own any hermes products; just stupidly expensive typefaces)

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      • [removed] a day ago
        [deleted]
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    • aeturnum a day ago

      Typefaces do have functional roles, they {exude} a point in culture and time (the fonts that HN supports certainly time-stamps it).

      edit: HN won't allow Fraktur[1] characters, even though they are in the unicode standard. Yet more evidence that font matters for the tone of the message you deliver.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur

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    • vunderba a day ago

      > A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document

      100% incorrect. There are fonts that are made specifically to increase legibility for a dyslexic audience. If that's not a functional role than I don't know what is.

      Reply View 4 replies
      • tptacek a day ago

        Oh for God's sake. You also can't set an instruction manual entirely in DIN Grindel Milk. The implied subtext was the functional equivalence of free and unfree display fonts. The most popular dyslexia font in the world is free.

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      • mrob 15 hours ago

        One dyslexia font was tested and found to have the same legibility as normal fonts:

        "Dyslexie font neither benefits nor impedes the reading process of children with and without dyslexia."

        https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11881-017-0154-6

        I'm skeptical that any of these fonts actually make a difference. (Although if you like Comic Sans, you might as well continue using it; it doesn't do any harm.)

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    • [removed] 17 hours ago
      [deleted]
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    • butlike 9 hours ago

      The truffle, and the font, add _essence_

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    • close04 20 hours ago

      > Truffles have a functional role in a dish

      Cheap "truffle oil" can fill that role as much as a free font can fill the role of a premium one. The real truffle and the premium font have a functional role for the few people who can tell either apart. For the rest maybe anything works, just put something on the plate or screen.

      Reply View 1 reply
  • bdelmas 17 hours ago

    A high price in a font won't sink a business as a high price in truffle would for a Michelin chef... The price of a font for a business is extremely negligible... Or again you shouldn't buy it if your business is too small. And if it's that small you should be able to justify the value added by buying that font as truffle does for the chef.

    So we are back at what OP said.

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    • pc86 17 hours ago

      Well the analogy falls apart because (among many, many other reasons) the people eating at Michelin rated restaurants, especially 3-star, are completely insensitive to the price. It will cost whatever it costs and there will still be a long wait to get a table, if you even can.

      So rather than pretending we're talking about truffles, let's just talk about fonts directly without strained analogies. Fonts, which the majority of people don't even recognize. 90% of people don't even know what a foundry is. Your average person can't tell the difference between any two fonts if they're both sans-serif or serif.

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      • bdelmas 14 hours ago

        It doesn't fall apart, you have examples that actually match it. Marketing boutiques of website creators match the 3-star Michelin analogy. High budgets from their customers (think LVMH) are the norm. And they will love and understand paying X for a font. In fact they will almost expect this type of thing in the design process.

        At the end of the day if people don't see the difference and the value between a free and a priced one, then they don't need to steal and can just use the free ones. There are plenty of amazing free fonts anyway some being the actual roots of many paying ones, and the gold standards.

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    • homebrewer 10 hours ago

      Maybe it won't sink the business, but prices were bad enough for IBM to cough up the money to grow their own truffles (of IBM Plex variety).

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  • mlx0x a day ago

    Where’s the car in this analogy?

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    • setopt a day ago

      How would you get away with the stolen truffles?

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derefr a day ago

Try this analogy out: it's no wonder that people are interested in / have demand for generic reproductions of licensed cultivars of a plant (e.g. buying generic "grape tomatoes" rather than specific, expensive "cherry tomatoes.")

It's also no wonder that people will happily buy these generics even when they're not white-box reverse-engineered phenotype reproductions via independent breeding, but carefully bred-true genetic descendants of the proprietary original cultivar (a.k.a. "seed piracy" — the thing Monsanto goes to extreme lengths to stop people from doing with their GMO wheat.)

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  • jonhohle a day ago

    I don’t particularly like the analogy, but love cherry tomatoes. Grape tomatoes are such a blight on this world. Kind of like Arial is to Helvetica.

    I would never steal a cherry tomato, but will reject a grape tomato at any chance I get.

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    • notarealllama a day ago

      I can't figure out how to download your comment. (Written in a serif font textarea which will show up as a generic arial)

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