Net Results: Tech news site news.com is carrying an interesting piece this week on the successful effort to create open source fonts for programs running on open source operating systems such as Linux.

Open source, says the ever-useful Wikipedia, "describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's sources". In other words, the source code remains freely available to be further amended and utilised in other projects. Proprietary end products never give access to their source code except under strict licensing deals.

Font production shows the growing maturity and professionalism of both Linux and the programs available for it. Linux isn't just about the sysadmin geeks in the basement any more. It is becoming a viable day-to-day operating system for work environments and, for the slightly more technically adept, the home as well.

Despite the enthusiasms of Linux devotees, I still do not feel Linux suits the average home computer user because installing it requires some basic understanding of how computers work and using command line interfaces (Window-less environments where all you get is a blinking cursor as a prompt to type in character-based commands - no pointing and clicking here).

But I have no doubt that the various "distributions" (as the varieties of Linux such as Ubuntu, Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE, available from different organisations, are called) are moving steadily towards the point where installations become easier, and consequently an increasing number of home users will try it out.

But back to the wonderful world of fonts. The thing about Linux and fonts was that until recently, almost no one was trying to design attractive, clean fonts for the operating system that would print nicely, include a wide range of characters and look like those available for more mainstream platforms such as Windows or the Macintosh.

These generally conform to standards such as TrueType (originally from Apple) and PostScript (originally from Adobe) that dictate how the fonts display by ensuring tight control over the lines and curves that make up the font. Thus a popular website typeface such as Arial looks consistent across different operating systems, programs and browsers. But Linux didn't have any particularly great fonts developed under the same open source philosophy as the operating system itself.

Instead, Linux users generally ended up using proprietary fonts from Microsoft, an irony one can assume would make many open source/free software developers squirm in their seats. For many open source advocates, Microsoft defines all that open source is not (despite the fact that the software giant now open sources quite a bit of code).

An early font project from font company Bitstream to develop some fonts for the Gnome project (Gnome is an international open source initiative to produce a full computing platform comprising a range of free software) produced a typeface called Vera, but the initiative went dormant in 2003. Now the effort has been revived, with one initial offspring of Vera being a font called DejaVu, which is getting lots of notice from the open source community and will be included in the latest update to Ubuntu Linux. According to news.com, it looks like it will also be the default font for Red Hat Linux, the highest profile of the Linux distributions.

DejaVu was driven by a distinct need: Vera did not support the special characters, called glyphs, needed to display some international languages. One of the main programmers behind DejaVu is Stepan Roh, who is Czech. And Czech needs certain glyphs to display correctly. Roh had no background in typography but started learning from scratch in 2004. He also successfully encouraged other developers, many of them working on bits and pieces of Vera to create other derivative fonts, to turn their focus to DejaVu.

The decision on whether DejaVu will go into Red Hat's Fedora version of Linux will be made in the coming weeks, in time for the new release scheduled for early October. If it does, it will be a great success for a small, communal, globally dispersed development team.

It's a small story but typifies what open source software is all about - lots of individuals each working on their own small story that fits into a much bigger, ongoing tale.