On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Greg Grossmeier <greg@wikimedia.org> wrote:
There's a lot of changes in Typography Refresh. One of the many is the
font css rule. The majority are changes that do not implicate the
Freeness of anything. The font does. The font change (originally) only
had a benefit to Mac OS users (right?).

No. 
 
Now the font change (after
Ryan's amazing work, which should have been done at the beginning) it
includes a benefit for people who will now get Liberation instead of
DejaVu (right?).

So, if my two (right?)'s above are correct, that makes me feel like the
design team only cared about OSX/iOS users before, and only after a LOT
of complaining on the various lists and bugs and such did they put in
the effort to see IF they could improve the experience for non-Apple
products.

Again no. We tested on Linux systems starting months ago, with the developers who have been working on this. Several of our iterations were focused on trying out free/open fonts to put first, and getting feedback about that. 
 
I find it also corroborated by the request from a Design team
member for access to a Windows computer to do testing on *last week*.

Vibha asked for a Windows machine because she does not normally do testing on Windows herself, as a designer. The developers and product managers do this testing, and we all sit down (or share screenshots remotely) to take a look. Kaldari, who was working with Vibha at the time, doesn't trust virtual machine-based testing of fonts. That's why they asked for a Windows machine. 
 
That may or may not be an accurate way to describe the situation,
historically, but that's how the narrative can easily be interpreted and
it is what I'm feeling from these discussions where I'm being told my
preference for not promoting proprietary stuff is "irrational."

This is not an accurate or fair representation. This kind of attitude ("all designers care about is OSX") is the kind of pernicious meme that drives good designers away from working on free software projects. It's akin to saying "women don't participate in $free_project because they aren't interested in working on free software". 

Why on god's green earth would a large, talented, and experienced team of designers come to work here if they didn't care about software and content freedom? Or that they didn't care about their work being widely accessible on all platforms? You think they did it because they love taking a pay cut? Or they love putting a project on their resume that has the same reputation that Craigslist does when it comes to lack of good design? Please assume some more good faith. These people know what they are doing, and they all made sacrifices to come and work here on Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki. 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager