Distribution
Red Hat licensed these fonts from Ascender Corp under the GNU General Public License with a font embedding exception, which states that documents embedding these fonts do not automatically fall under the GNU GPL, but will still likely cause problems with commercial software. As a further exception, any distribution of the object code of the Software in a physical product must provide you the right to access and modify the source code for the Software and to reinstall that modified version of the Software in object code form on the same physical product on which you received it. Thus, these fonts permit free and open source software (FLOSS) systems to have high-quality fonts that are metric-compatible with Microsoft software.
The Fedora Project, as of version 9 was the first major GNU/Linux distribution to include these fonts by default and features a slightly revised versions of the Liberation fonts contributed by Ascender. These include a dotted zero and various changes made for the benefit of internationalization.
Some other GNU/Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Mandriva Linux) included Liberation fonts in their default installations. The open source software OpenOffice.org included Liberation fonts in its installation packages for all supported operating systems.
Due to licensing concerns with fonts released under a GPL licence, some projects have been looking for alternatives to the Liberation fonts. Starting with Apache OpenOffice 3.4 Liberation Fonts were replaced with the Chrome OS Fonts -- also known as Croscore fonts: Arimo (sans), Cousine (monospace), and Tinos (serif) -- which are newer versions of the same designs but made available by Ascender Corporation under the SIL Open Font License. It has been suggested that the next release of the Liberation fonts might be based on the Croscore fonts.
Read more about this topic: Liberation Fonts
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