NEW YORK—The GNOME Foundation and Bitstream Inc., a developer of font technology, on Wednesday will announce here at LinuxWorld that ten serif, sans serif and monospaced fonts will be released under a special open-source license, once they have been adapted to meet the requirements for technical use.
The move will bring advanced font capabilities to developers and users of free and open source software. The Bitstream Vera fonts will be available for free copying and redistribution and can be modified as long as the font name is changed. The fonts cannot be packaged for sale by themselves, but can be sold with any software.
The GNOME Foundation, which provides organizational, financial and legal support to the GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) Linux desktop project and helps determine its vision and road map, will incorporate the fonts into future GNOME releases, giving end users and GNOME developers access to their advanced display capabilities.
“This agreement with Bitstream will enhance the experience and graphics capabilities of corporate, enterprise, educational, governmental and individual GNOME users and will give powerful tools to open-source developers everywhere,” said Miguel de Icaza, the GNOME Foundations president and chief technology officer of Ximian Inc.
“The donation of these fonts to the free software community is the final piece that will give full functionality to projects like Freetype, XFT2 and X Render extensions of the XFree86 project, Pango, KDE and Trolltechs QT, among many others.” said Jim Gettys, a GNOME Foundation board member.
“These fonts will be available to all developers and users, giving GNOME and other open-source programs a great look right out of the box that has been lacking until now,” he said.
Bob Thomas, Bitstreams director of product management, said the company hopes its move will spur developers to generate new fonts and continue to enhance the experience of end users.