To be precise, it takes 1 employee to say "used in X". It takes corporate decision to say "used by X". And it takes a written agreement to be able to use the trademarked logo of X on your page. (I know, because I have collected more than 60 such agreements to show logos on a page).
Com'on, it's not that bad. The idea of these organizations is that, since they're using and testing this software, "we'll see any issues first, we'll let you know, and we'll deal with it." The quoted part bears some resemblance to the tasks of Akrites.
Remains to be seen whether history will repeat itself: when the tax breaks/ free AI use stops, will anyone keep doing this?
Disclaimer: I have had nothing to do with this initiative, and was not consulted on the name.
I can also recommend a book from my library: Typoésie by Jérôme Peignot (Imprimerie nationale editions, Paris, 1993), ISBN 2-11-081272-9 (or newer edition 9782742757985).
From the book description: The works of the great typographers of the 20th century are featured: Maximilien Vox, Cassandre’s “Bifur,” Piet Zwart, the Americans Martin Solomon and Herb Lubalin, Raymond Gid, and Guy Levis Mano. The book also showcases the visual poetry of the Germans Gomringer, Mon, and Rühm; the Brazilians de Campos and Pignatari; Emmet Williams; Christian Dotremont; and Jacques Roubaud; and the “typoems” by painters such as Matisse, Magritte, Duchamp, Lissitzky, Raymond Hains, Jiri Kollar, Jasper Johns, and Valerio Adami. Even mathematics and musical notation are included.
No, you don't get the holidays back -- nor do you get weekends, if you're sick.
On the other hand, I've been in a company where there were long discussions about whether the extra day on leap years is a working day or a vacation day...
> was Metafont the only outline-based font technology
Surely Karow's Ikarus was earlier than that.
One of the main innovations of Metafont was the use of "pen"s, so that one would describe a single path and the software would trace it and imitate the use of one or more pens, to end with an outline of something with thickness, and essentially more curves. It mimics how drawing and writing actually happens.
AFAIK, Zapf did not like this approach at all, as he was used to design typefaces the traditional way, by specifying all the curves. Richard Southall embraced the new paradigm and used Metafont as it was supposed to be used, but produced only a couple of demo typefaces (mainly the nmt family) and a handful of commercial ones (I can now only remember Colorado, with Ladislas Mandel, used in the phone directories of US West). I think he also implemented Melior, but of course this was never distributed as it was a proprietary Zapf design.
Note: all the above are based on recollections of my discussions with Zapf, Southall, and Knuth, in the distant past. All my relevant printed materials are in a different country right now, and I don't have easy access to them.
They definitely also had NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access): on multi-CPU systems, you had a variety of ways to specify where you wanted your data to live (stay close to one CPU, for example).
People who look for solutions in this space (Time Series DB for measurements, for example) can also look at the good ol' RRDtool https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ first released more than 25 years ago...
I concur completely. Back in those days, the very basic stuff you mention (awk, sed, make) were being built by a handful of people, all sitting together, and the few outsiders who were submitting enhancements (even before these were called "patches") knew the email addresses to send these to. For Sendmail, you should contact the people at Berkeley, for most of the others you sent to Bell Labs.
Then software started appearing from other points. We were getting new versions of software after email announcements -- and later on, on comp.sources.unix -- and we were reading the comments to see that other people were contributing, too.
The way you publish your software (especially today) essentially boils down to how much you are looking for contributors vs. users (vs. no one at all).
Most of this is based on Copyright legal framework, which is surprisingly homogeneous around the world. The discussions about ownership of AI-generated material are exactly the same in EU.