A Thicker Hope - Hackdot

Re:A Thicker Hope by omaranto on Monday July 08, 2013 @06:10PM (#6009693)

I found the bit that says "If not, you probably don’t care about fonts, so it will be Comic Sans" unnecesarily agressive and false: his post displayed completely in Droid Serif for me. I don't install Helvetica Neue or Comic Sans on my Linux machine because I don't have a license for those fonts (I guess you get one for Helvetica Neue with your copy of iOS, right?).

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Re:A Thicker Hope by foobarbazqux on Monday July 08, 2013 @06:27PM (#6009769)

Comic Sans is one of the MS core fonts for the web and is free to use. Your distro probably calls the package corefonts or something. I'm guessing that Debian doesn't include it in main because it's a non-free license with respect to distribution and modification, but you certainly have permission to use it and you might even be allowed to include its glyphs in documents that you sell.

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Re:A Thicker Hope by omaranto on Monday July 08, 2013 @10:52PM (#6010820)

Are you sure about Comic Sans? The only information I could find from Microsoft was on their font redistribution FAQ [1] and it says

    Until recently, most fonts that include a Microsoft
    copyright or trademark notice have only been available
    as part of Microsoft products. Although some fonts 
    remain Microsoft-exclusive, a number of Microsoft fonts 
    are now available to end users, ISVs and OEMs under 
    license from Ascender Corporation. These include 
    'Verdana', 'Georgia', 'Comic Sans MS', 'Microsoft Sans 
    Serif', 'Nina', 'Tahoma', 'Wingdings', 'Webdings' and 
    'Trebuchet MS'.

Doesn't that mean that to use Comic Sans you have to negotiate with Ascender Corporation? I couldn't find anything on Ascender's website suggesting any font at all was free to use (I didn't read everything carefully though), and about the MS core web fonts specifically this page [2] makes it sounds like you need to buy a license from them to use them:

    Monotype is proud to offer the Microsoft Web Core Fonts 
    for license to software developers and hardware 
    manufacturers who want to provide a consistent web 
    browsing experience in their products.

    Please contact Monotype for more information about the 
    Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/typography/RedistributionFAQ.mspx

[2] http://www.ascendercorp.com/catalog/microsoft/web-core-fonts...

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Re:A Thicker Hope by foobarbazqux on Monday July 08, 2013 @11:31PM (#6010936)

Basically Microsoft screwed up with the license for version 2, and it's legal to redistribute and use them, at least as an end user. They changed things for later versions. There's a good amount of coverage of the legal status on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

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