<quote name="Steven Walling" date="2014-03-10" time="17:19:55 +0000">
On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 4:57 PM, Greg Grossmeier greg@wikimedia.org wrote:
The harm is promoting a nonFree font in our CSS. Full stop. It's that simple.
Again... promoting to whom? Who will look at our CSS, and of those, who will think MediaWiki is no longer free software? How will this impair our ability to attract and retain readers and editors of Wikimedia projects, or developers of MediaWiki? How does it create a dependency that hobbles us in the long run?
This is not a risk that is grounded in facts about who pays attention to CSS, how font-family settings work, the general milieu on the Web in terms of font-family settings, and what we will actually deliver to users through Vector. You keep saying we're promoting it, but not explaining to whom or how, and what real harm that causes to us as an organization.
1) Who will think MediaWiki is no longer free software?
The software that is written is Free, but not all of the bits it promotes/recommends are. Thus, it is compromising. Compromising is something that must be done with all the facts. If the compromise is done to only make it so OSX/iOS users get Helvetica Neue instead of just Helvetica, is it worth it? My stance (and many others') is that it is not.
2) "Promotion" may be a wrong word. How about "Prefer"? Or "Recommend"?
But that shouldn't matter.
This change [insert whatever word from above you like, conjugated correctly] the use of a non-Free font.