Since fonts are licensed by the user rather than the distributor of the software, I don't really see a strong ideological argument for only specifying free-license fonts. MediaWiki explicitly supports Internet Explorer, for example, which isn't open source. We also have an iOS mobile app. In some cases we simply have to live with the realities of what our users are using (which unfortunately isn't always open source). That said, my personal preference would be for us to keep our font neutrality and not declare anything other than 'serif' and 'sans-serif', but I'm open to listening to other people's arguments.
Ryan Kaldari
On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 9:43 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <bjorsch@wikimedia.org
wrote:
I came across Gerrit change 79948[1] today, which makes "VectorBeta" use a pile of non-free fonts (with one free font thrown in at the end as a sop). Is this really the direction we want to go, considering that in many other areas we prefer to use free software whenever we can?
Looking around a bit, I see this has been discussed in some "back corners"[2][3] (no offense intended), but not on this list and I don't see any place where free versus non-free was actually discussed rather than being brought up and then seemingly ignored.
In case it helps, I did some searching through mediawiki/core and WMF-deployed extensions for font-family directives containing non-free fonts. The results are at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Anomie/font-family (use of non-staff account intentional).
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