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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

I've never really thought about this. Perhaps I missed it from the article and maybe this is a dumb question but is there a font that is truly open source, royalty free and recognized / built-in to browsers? Is there such a thing as a royalty free font family that the popular browsers would all recognize by name? Could that even become a legal battle?

Monotype owns most major fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Gotham, Times New Roman.

    font-family:Open Sans,Arial
    font-family:monospace

If I use any of those in HTML can someone claim royalties on my text? Should this concept itself become a font family? e.g. font-family:royalty-free and let the client decide on their favorites royalty-free fonts?

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No. The OS platforms have broad system licences for those fonts; your readers will also have those licences.

The royalty is being paid in the OS licence attached to the viewer's computer, basically.

There are meta-font-families for system fonts, and you can effectively use "monospace", "serif", and "sans serif" and the system is going to choose the typeface that best meets those requirements.

Interesting. That has activated more questions in my noggin. Now I am more curious than anything how much each of the OS and browser vendors are paying in royalties. Beyond that of course there are browser forks usually managed by a handful of developers volunteering their time. Are those forks a legal ticking time bomb? I would be surprised if they strip out the code for the non system fonts.

The browser will generally be relying on the system font renderer, so they kick that particular can down the road.

For a time, Microsoft had a package of "core fonts for the web" that they made some deal with Monotype for:

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

Those are still out there because the licence for those specific files remains legitimate, though a 21 year old typeface is not necessarily a useful thing anymore.

That package was used as the basis of "nonfree" packages in various distributions, that would download the MS archive file and unpack/install it.

I also wonder about how much Monotype charges Microsoft.

Ubuntu of course paid for their own system faces to be designed (which I like but not enough to use on my desktop). And Firefox has its own core font family (Fira), for example, that it can use in its own products as an alternate (I think it was designed for the late not-much-lamented Firefox OS)

> The royalty is being paid in the OS licence attached to the viewer's computer, basically.

So who is paying for Linux? Or is Linux using open source alternatives to these fonts?

Linux uses free fonts like Open Sans, Roboto, etc.

Microsoft is. They actually made them available for anyone to use everywhere because they wanted them to be standard on the web.

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

Most of those fonts donated by Microsoft are only among the fonts owned by Microsoft, e.g. Georgia and Verdana.

They have included only a few fonts licensed from Monotype, e.g. Arial.

Besides the fonts donated by Microsoft, there are many other free fonts that have been donated by big companies like Google, Adobe, Intel, URW, Bitstream, JetBrains and others.

There are also many free fonts donated by individual creators.

The fonts in that package were not donated, but licensed -- it had an EULA.

But the versions of the font files in that package are rusting at this point; there's no compelling reason to use them anywhere, IMO.

You are right that perhaps the word "donate" is not the most appropriate, because for typefaces, like for programs, the author does not normally transfer ownership but only grants certain rights for using the typeface.

By "donate" I have meant that the typeface owners have forsaken the revenues corresponding to the licensing fees that they have stopped demanding, allowing the free use of those typefaces. It can be said that they have donated the value of the work that was needed to create those typefaces.

You are also right that now this Corefonts package is mostly of historical interest, because the included fonts are very old. Unlike these, the corresponding Windows fonts have been maintained, by fixing bugs and adding new Unicode characters.

Some Linux users buy themselves whatever fonts they like, e.g. from one of the many on-line stores.

Most Linux users use only free fonts, some of which are metrically equivalent with the more popular Windows fonts, so they will substitute those in documents and Web pages.

Some Linux users, like also some of the users of other operating systems, may use unlicensed copies of some popular fonts.

what about linux?

Answered elsewhere I think. But basically there are open source fonts now (Roboto, Open Sans, Liberation, Adobe's Source family) as well as distinctive fonts like Ubuntu, and a legacy way to get the core fonts.

Linux can (with quite a bit of pain) use font alternatives to swap in Liberation Sans for Arial or whatever (at least I assume that is what is happening)

> Is there such a thing as a royalty free font family that the popular browsers would all recognize by name?

Yes "Liberation Fonts" [0]

> [...] compatible with the most popular fonts on the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office software package (Monotype Corporation's Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman and Courier New, respectively), for which Liberation is intended as a free substitute.

e.g The Debian package is here, which I you need to install to get sites to not look wonkey in the official Firefox package: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/fonts-liberation.

I suspect packaged linux browsers through snap, flatpak, and the windows/macos equivalents, also bundle liberation fonts to avoid MS license issues.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

The more I think about this and based on the really good answers to my silly question it feels like there is a giant gap here. Feels... It feels like there should be a universally open source, royalty free sans-like and monospace-like font that has been optimized for screen readers for vision impaired as well as developers to spend hours/days coding in and contributed to the internet for all devices to use. I have no evidence to back this up, it's just a feeling.

Not a font to download or embed but rather a set of fonts that is already embedded in all the things so anyone could just reference it. So in CSS something like:

    font-family:open-free-monospace
    font-family:open-free-serif

Rather than providing a URL to download the fonts, everything already has the fonts preinstalled. OS, IoT, toasters, cars, phones. All the things. Surely there must be a set of highly artistic altruistic people that might wish to contribute such a thing to humanity.

No because the point of system fonts is that whoever made your operating system has already paid the license fee to be able to render text using that typeface.

Monotype has such deals across the board.

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