Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 12:52 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
There's an open question in my mind as to what constitutes a "non-free font,"
In this context, I mean "non-free" in the context of libre rather than gratis.[1]
Right. The "libre" part is what I consider a legal issue, though I think I understand more clearly now that you're talking about technical policy here.
There are a number of fonts that can be downloaded for free (gratis) but are under terms along the lines of a CC -NC or -ND license, and there are more that are distributed with various popular operating systems so many people already have them for "free" in the loosest sense. I'm not counting these as free here.
Thank you for clarifying this point. It might be helpful to have a list of gratis/libre fonts and a list of gratis/non-libre fonts, if such lists don't exist already.
As far as I know, MediaWiki (core) has historically preferred to specify nothing more than sans-serif. There now seems to be a trend away from this.
https://www.wikimedia.org/wiki/Guiding_principles#Freedom_and_open_source is a citation for my earlier claim that Wikimedia prefers free to non-free. Nemo_bis pointed me toward this related discussion as well: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2012-October/000191.html.
MZMcBride