IANAL, but the discussion seems poorly framed. AIUI, font software is protected, but the glyph shapes represented therein are not. So if your company produces a software-product font, I would need your permission to legitimately use that software, but I would not need permission to write and use software that coincidentally produced exactly the same glyph shapes. TFA is not distinguishing between fonts as software and fonts as sets of glyphs of a particular design.