This pretty much slipped under the radar…

Red Hat have provided the FOSS community with ‘drop in replacements’ for the main fonts provided by ‘msttcorefonts’ (Arial, Times New Roman et al). They have done this “to say thank you to all our friends in the open source community for all you have done to make us successful.” Which is awfully nice. These fonts are provided under GPLv2 + 2 exceptions (not sure exactly why these are required).

Announcement: Here

There was an initial effort for packaging these for repository ‘Universe’ HERE – But from my understanding Debian’s font ‘task-force’ are also packaging it – but are concerned about a licensing issue that they are trying to deal with upstream (Red-Hat). So i’ll probably nuke my package.

 EDIT:
Although the package hasn’t been officially released due to the above problems.  Debian’s pre-released package is available here, It should work without any problems.  However, not being an official package the normal ‘health warning’ applies.

May 18th, 2007 | All, ubuntu, ubuntu-uk