Seriously, Google. Stop taking Facebook's advice. At your scale, "move fast and break things" raises entire industries to the ground in one fell swoop when something is unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire.
Okay, we get it, you're so insecure and your corporate management is so fickle and uncertain everything is in a constant state of flux. But we, the general public, aren't supposed to be aware of how much of everything is on fire. It's unprofessional when you leak that much information. You're not hiding your tells very effectively...
Be more like swans. Feet flipping like mad under the water, calm and serene on the surface. Be consistent. Be predictable. Be something everyone can count on. Nobody knows what you'll pull the plug on next week. What you replace it with doesn't matter. "Look at us we augmented our muscles so we can run faster than cheetahs!!1" is just passive-aggressive and rude. Technically it's an undeniably viable way to compete, practically your laundry list of unimpressed casualties isn't getting any shorter. You need to look at the bigger picture and stop just hyperfocusing on the clinical, sterile mathematical stance.
I remember opening a javascript file somewhere between 2006-2009 and seeing the string "don't be evil'" (including the single quotes, just like that - the weird formatting is why I remember it verbatim). That disappeared a few years ago. Can we have that back? You're currently into a race into the ground, and you'll be dead within the next 20 years if you don't stop.
That's what we do. I use only gmail, drive, analytics, Adwords, google play and youtube.
I'm treating everything else as unstable or beta. Even their cloud offerings.
Hmm, seems like Google may be the ones who screwed up here, by not having a versioning system on Google Fonts. If they did (and guaranteed that fonts wouldn't change after being selected), this wouldn't have happened.
Then again, part of me wonders whether fonts should be updated in general. Version control and regular updates work fine for programs and what not, but fonts are really like images in that people only care what they look like at the time they use them. Changing a font's weight or design like this seems like the equivalent of a stock photo program swapping out images because they think the lighting wasn't done right or the choice of model was wrong. Yes it may be 'objectively' better, but it'd just break a lot of existing use cases for little gain.
From a rational and removed standpoint, it is clearly not acceptable. There are some confounding factors here, however. For one, Google specifically advises to use their hosted version of the font instead of self-hosting. Another issue is that these people are clearly frustrated by the nonchalant attitude of the maintainers when it comes to breaking others work.
If you are telling people to use your hosted version of your open-source contribution yet have no care for responsible stewardship, you are being irresponsible at the expense of others.
If you don’t want emotional responses after purposefully breaking the hard work of many, you are being unreasonable. While we should strive to be respectful and courteous under such tension, I can understand that not everyone is successful every time.
In other words, I think empathy should go both ways here. Usually, I find that others act very unreasonably and rudely towards maintainers of open source contributions. In this case, I think both parties have made mistakes that deserve forgiving (but not ignoring), including the rude emotional reactions. Both parties should apologize to one another.
Imagine all the sites you ever worked on suddenly broke and all your clients called you demanding satisfaction. This is a direct result of something Google has done after telling you they wouldn't (you could infer this according to their guidelines saying not host the fonts yourself).
Being the nice guy you are, you bring the issue up to them and give them a very reasonable solution.
Not only do they ignore you, but they do it again.
The maintainer is being remarkably thick-headed. The font has been accessed 3.65 BILLION times. A designer from Nike is posting on the issue. A LOT of people use this font, this is global. When someone comes to you with an issue (a big one at that), you need to do more than just say "eh, too bad, do it yourself".
Wtf is the point of google fonts if I can't rely on them to serve fonts? What is a "Font" anymore? The new "version" isn't Montserrat, it's Montserrat2, and it's been hotswapped with Montserrat.
I find this a bit confusing. Montserrat is distributed under an open license [1] which allows commercial redistribution "as long as they [fonts] are not sold by themselves". If people want to use a specific version - and clearly, they feel very strongly about it - why not host it themselves?
Because Google goes out of their way to advise you not to self-host fonts and to use theirs?
Versioning isn't really a huge ask, in my opinion. My experience with Google APIs in general has always been that expectations don't match results. Documentation never matches the specification. This goes double for their own API clients, especially if the language is not Python or Go.
It's sort of maddening how much the company wants you to rely on them for everything and simultaneously not give any concern to how usable their products are.
I haven't yet seen the big picture discussed here in the comments:
Sometimes things change because people need to justify their jobs!
A lot of people would be out of jobs if their status reports said, week after week: "everything is fine, it all works, no complaints, no improvements needed, we've leaving everything as it is".
It's just that simple. It's probably the reason why most software related things change.
Unfortunately sometimes things change for the worse. E.g. in the Apple world, AirPort Utility was rewritten and lost functionality. Disk Utility was rewritten and lost functionality. But someone at Apple got to put down on their status that they "simplified" or "improved" or "updated" or (whatever) those programs.
A lot of thought goes into designs. People labour over these things for months. It's a stab in the heart to see it all get thrown out the window. Why spend that time at all if it's just going to get thrown out? You feel meaningless when this happens.
99% of users don't block web font downloads. Do a quick search for how to block font downloads on your computer. It's a technical task.
It's not really fair to blame Google (or someone else) because you built a giant house of cards and a gust of wind blew it away, even if it is a bit sad and people put a lot of work in it. According to this article, even the very easy workaround of hosting the font yourself is too much to ask.
Still it's a matter of time before the rendering engines change to another correct interpretation of the specification and everything falls apart again.
This all reminds me of that ridiculous thing of the late zeroes that was 'Sifr'. No, you don't get to run 20 Flash applets on your text page just so you can show fancy headings.
I understand that you can be frustrated in a situation like this, but do they act like this in person as well if someone makes a mistake or if they have a disagreement?
I don't even see why they bring up the poor version handling of Google Fonts in this issue. They should send the feedback to Google or stop using Google's services.
Okay, we get it, you're so insecure and your corporate management is so fickle and uncertain everything is in a constant state of flux. But we, the general public, aren't supposed to be aware of how much of everything is on fire. It's unprofessional when you leak that much information. You're not hiding your tells very effectively...
Be more like swans. Feet flipping like mad under the water, calm and serene on the surface. Be consistent. Be predictable. Be something everyone can count on. Nobody knows what you'll pull the plug on next week. What you replace it with doesn't matter. "Look at us we augmented our muscles so we can run faster than cheetahs!!1" is just passive-aggressive and rude. Technically it's an undeniably viable way to compete, practically your laundry list of unimpressed casualties isn't getting any shorter. You need to look at the bigger picture and stop just hyperfocusing on the clinical, sterile mathematical stance.
I remember opening a javascript file somewhere between 2006-2009 and seeing the string "don't be evil'" (including the single quotes, just like that - the weird formatting is why I remember it verbatim). That disappeared a few years ago. Can we have that back? You're currently into a race into the ground, and you'll be dead within the next 20 years if you don't stop.