Do you know anyone who works in design?

I do.

And quite franky, all of them would laugh in your face if you told them that fonts are something that ought to be provided "for free". Fonts come from designers, designers work hard and should be paid for their work. Accordingly, real professional designers pay for fonts -- by the hundreds or thousands, sometimes, so many fonts their computers slow down if they don't use special software to manage them all.

This is also why the strongest, healthiest software ecosystem exists on macOS. Because macOS still has that cultural creative core of its user base, a culture which believes that people who create things should be paid for their efforts. Accordingly, you can still release a commercial proprietary program on macOS and expect to make significant money -- even from a small user base. That's certainly not true on Linux and it increasingly isn't true on Windows -- except, maybe, for gaming.

As for the average person, we're not even talking about the digital world. Everything in print, everything written on television, uses fonts. And if they employ professional designers, those are going to be commercial fonts. The real deal, the ones that were first set in hot type by Swiss or Austrian guys a hundred years ago or more. Open source substitutes are no substitute at all.

> This is also why the strongest, healthiest software ecosystem exists on macOS.

What do you mean by "strongest" and "healthiest"?

In my experience, most software is very cross-platform these days, and most platform-exclusive software is Windows-only.

Internet trolls work hard and they deserve to be paid for their work.

> [designers] would laugh in your face if you told them that fonts are something that ought to be provided "for free"

That's a big *whoosh* or else you just felt like attacking a strawman.

Like I already said, I'm referring to how all major operating systems (including desktop Linux distros) bundle dozens of fonts to cover common needs. No average consumer is expected to spend additional money gaining the ability to see Greek math symbols or pseudo-handwriting or whatever.

It isn't the 1990s where you might see a retail-display box for Microsoft Windows 3.x adjacent to Microsoft TrueType Font Pack for Windows and Adobe Type Basics.

Similarly, disk-defragmentation tools are now in there "for free", and a TCP/IP stack is there "for free", etc.

Well yes, but in era of reproducible science, we need fonts which can be reproduced by the people who recompile the scientific data and regenerate the reports. Proprietary fonts are kind of a bottleneck in that respect.