alt Hacker NewsWhy did we go from owning the software we run and being able to just modify things as we see fit to "You have to give Google a lot of money so you can have your own font in your own presentation"?
Where did things go this wrong?
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I'm going to go the unpopular route and ask, how mission-critical are fonts, really? Protected fonts such as these can't be mission-critical, legally, right?
Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself. Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for typeface discovery.
If you want to drink your own wine in a restaurant, you have to pay for that, too.
This isn’t much different; there still are plenty of non-Google options for creating presentations to choose from that do allow using your own font.
When we stopped paying for things. Seriously. If you pay for software, you can modify it. If you pay Google, they’ll modify it for you.
Yes, the EULA may prohibit modifications of local installations, but you’re not physically restricted from doing so - only contractually.
We ignored Richard Stallman?
Most people decided that convenience was better than freedom and self-determination.
If people want the freedom to use their own fonts in their own presentation, and don't want to pay handsomely for the privilege, LibreOffice is freely downloadable. But they don't want to use that for some reason.
You can still pay Microsoft money to get a desktop copy of Powerpoint, which will use your system fonts. Using google docs is entirely self-inflicted
Granted, you now need to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for Powerpoint instead of a one-time-fee. But that is in large part because too many people preferred Google Docs, so Microsoft tried to become more like them