Isn't it kind of rude to jump on an announcement of a project to claim that the project is too important to be run by the entity that incepted it and paid for all its development up to this point? Anyway, this very announcement notes that these fonts are now all on github at https://github.com/notofonts. Anyone who feels better qualified to manage the project can easily fork these repos.

Perhaps it is a bit rude. But the problem is that Google's Noto have sucked all the oxygen out of the room. There were lots of people who were working on fonts with broad coverage. They now find it hard to get funding because "Why bother? Google is doing it."

Just like any monopoly, they dominate and then abandon.

They could have funded an independent foundation, or sponsored existing teams, or paid an external agency.

Instead they made a big fanfare, got a lot of attention, and tried to make themselves the arbiter of what should receive attention.

So there were efforts before the Noto fonts that were significantly better funded than they are now? Is there any publicly available documentation for this claim?

I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for OSS Unicode typefaces and the stuff from before Noto looks to mostly be collections of other OSS typefaces. Maybe MPH 2B Damase had some independent funding? I can't tell. But if these efforts had significant funding it is not apparent from their output.

Based on the information I have available to me at this time, I can only conclude that the space of broad Unicode fonts is in a much better state now with Google's efforts on Noto than it would have been in the counterfactual where they did not make those efforts.

I think the great work by Chris Harvey is more notable.

http://www.languagegeek.com/

He's been developing the Aboriginal fonts for decades, when many people working on language documentation were only vaguely aware of Unicode. He was very responsive to projects I worked on and added characters into the private use areas whene Unicode hadn't defined characters yet. This allowed school children as well as researchers to use orthographies they wouldn't otherwise be able to use electronically. Many language documentation projects have relied on his work.

The Noto fonts are nice but kind of late comers. Google has a history of making a brief noise about endangered language projects before abandoning them. This site was originally a Google project that was abandoned for years:

http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

The characterization on the site is that Google always intended to hand it off but the reality is that there was a big noise made by the company and then nothing more than an essentially empty web site sitting there for years until it was taken over by other groups.

Fonts don't go away but I would be very weary of trusting Google with data as important as endangered language documentation. You never know when they'll turn out the lights. They'd do a lot more good by helping to fund and support existing projects that have demonstrated long term commitments.