On 24 Feb 2003, Cees de Groot wrote:

> That's the biggest issue I have with the license. It's extremely vague -
> what is a 'derivative software product'. And what if I want to use them
> for something that does not fit that term?
> 
> Helvetica has no usage restriction and no 'advertising clause'.
> Therefore, I'm in favor of using that (and Times, Courier to complete
> the set of basic glyphs, of course).

There are also literally hundreds of fonts that come with X11 and that
have no copyright whatsoever attached (and the remaining ones come under
the XC copyright which is even less restrictive than BSD).

Of course, the glyphs above 127 are all in the "wrong" places, but maybe
this would be an opportunity to do away with MacRoman once and for all [1]
and convert everything to ISO-8859-1 [2].

I've been using -*-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1 as
my default text/menu font [3] for the last couple of years and I'm
entirely happy with it (modulo left arrow, but I'm lazier than John
Sarkela and I just live with it. ;).

Ian

[1] It all depends on who you want to cause problems for.  Either all
    non-Mac fonts will have to be rearranged manually (ouch!) so the
    equivalent glyphs (that exist at all in the font) coincide with
    MacRoman.  Otherwise any font that isn't encoded MacRoman is going
    to cause JMM hassle because he'll have to convert in the Classic
    VM, the same way the Unix VM currently converts between MacRoman
    and ISO-8859-1.  (I don't know about the Windows VM, but it maybe
    has to convert to/from some ridiculous proprietary MS encoding
    too.)

[2] aka Latin-1.  http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html

[3] http://www-sor.inria.fr/~piumarta/squeak/helvet.png