On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 12:52 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
While this is a technical mailing list, this is a topic dealing with legal issues.
This doesn't have any legal issues as far as I know, since we're not distributing any fonts in this context. It's just a matter of whether we should tell the browser that it should use "Helvetica Neue" or "Helvetica" or "Arial" if the user has them available, or if we should prefer free fonts or just use the browser's default fonts.
Legal issues would arise in the context of webfonts, but that's not the concern here.
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]
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
P.S. In my original message, I overlooked the fact that Nimbus Sans L is available under the GPL at http://svn.ghostscript.com/ghostscript/trunk/urw-fonts/. So there are actually two free fonts included in Gerrit change 79948, one if which is being preferred to Arial.