It’s depressingly cultural for open source to be dick-measuringly sexist, but MS makes money when they’re friendly to women.
It’s really not surprising. Open source developers are great at making tools for open source developers, but I don’t think they even see what they’re lacking from the people they turn off or push away. Women (probably to their credit) mostly don’t think like open source developers.
And no sooner do I make fun of open-source typefaces than someone points me to Crimson Text, a Garamond-inspired open-source face (with an eminently elegant ampersand).
Lest you think I’ve changed my mind on open-source fonts: it still suffers from sloppiness, though: for example, none of the different weights and styles sit on the same baseline, and the kerning needs work. Still, it is far better than most.
Inspired by Dan Cederholm’s “Use the Best Ampersand Available,” Mark Pilgrim has a new site featuring ampersands from open-source fonts.
Only problem is, only one or two are ever going to be the best ampersand available. Which is kind of the problem with open source.
