Free/Open Source fonts

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 9/21/05, Peter Jones <pjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> That's just not the case.  There's a reason Ariel has very slight
> differences from Helvetica, and it's not that MS didn't think Helvetica
> looked right.  It's also not that they couldn't figure out how to copy
> it.
>
> > Taking a copyright-protected font for the artwork will not conflict
> > the open source values of Fedora.
>
> I think it's reasonable to use a copyrighted font, yes.

I don't.. but beyond that, do we really want that font?
I showed the proposed fedora logo to three folks in my little local
fedora-using community, and all three of them made a negative comment
about the font, and I was specifically told that the one used on the
fedora desktop logo looked nicer.  This surprised me somewhat, because
I hadn't even noticed the font, ... I was too busy trying to come up
with an explanation of why I felt the bubble shape felt wrong.

In general I don't know what we're saying about the usefulness of the
"infinite freedom" desktop if you can't even reproduce its logo with a
free font. :)  Since the characters can just be distributed as paths,
perhaps it's not a big issue, but I'd presume that it may be desirable
to have the sub-projects text in the same typeface, so the use of a
non-free font might even present practical issues.