Fonts are an interesting creature. We hardly consider them when using a computer. Yet, without a font to represent the text and information in a computer, the machine would be a box of plastic, metal and glass. Thus free fonts are essential to free computing.
Paraphrasing from the Open Font Library[1]
Libre/open fonts are about FREEDOM, not price.
They are fonts that preserve and protect your:
- freedom to use for any purpose
- freedom to study how they were made
- freedom to improve
- freedom to redistribute, both exact and improved copies
- freedom to embed, subset, bundle and derive from to create any kind of artwork or document
- freedom to do all of these things commercially as it is about freedom, not price.
Licensing
In 2005, David "Novalis" Turner of the FSF created the "font exception" to the GPL license to deal with fonts [2][3]
Since fonts are so intertwined with linguistics, it's no surprise that SIL International has an open font license
Availability
There are a lot of free fonts out there. For example, see John Strake's Essays 1743 font which was used in typesetting Dive Into HTML 5 Back in the old days, if you used Linux, you'd have to get the Microsoft Core Fonts separately from the operating system because although the fonts were not sold, they could not be distributed.
- The Liberation Fonts, initially released in 2007, is a font family which aims at metric compatibility with Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New. It is sponsored by Red Hat. They are included in most Linux distributions.
- FreeFont by GNU
- wp:Ubuntu_(typeface) is a family of fonts created by Canonical https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu Font Family
- The Open Font Library is a sister project to OpenClipArt and the Libre Graphics project http://openfontlibrary.org/
- With the ever-increasing phenomenon of software as a service (from "the cloud") Google Fonts (formerly Google Web Fonts) is one method for sourcing fonts for online use https://www.google.com/fonts
- Genericons is a free, GPL, flexible icon font for the web
- See also Free software Unicode typefaces
- We chose the Linux Libertine font for our logo, and it turns out that a lot of people like this font. It's a free replacement for Times New Roman
References
Font Artists
We've all doodled with pencil and paper to make letters and Mother's Day cards. Some people still do it. The leading free software for people who want to develop fonts is FontForge https://fontforge.github.io/