this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
487 points (94.2% liked)
linuxmemes
32149 readers
712 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
- Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
- Don't come looking for advice, this is not the right community.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
5. π¬π§ Language/ΡΠ·ΡΠΊ/Sprache
- This is primarily an English-speaking community. π¬π§π¦πΊπΊπΈ
- Comments written in other languages are allowed.
- The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
- Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
6. (NEW!) Regarding public figures
We all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations. - Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
- We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
- Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed. Β
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments

I hate the fact that i like their font so much. After i found out the license was pulled into question and my distro wasn't packaging it, i switched to something else, but so far nothing really hits the same way for me as a GUI font.
Same. But is someone going to sue me if I install it on whatever unafiliated distro I use? It's going to be just fine as long as I don't distribute it, especially since I'm more interested in it as a terminal font than as a GUI font.
Well the reason i care is because i use a distro that is exclusively libre (Guix). I do have to use a separate channel to get the regular kernel cause i simply can't go without it, but i figured i may as well use libre-only as much as possible, especially for something as easily replaceable as a font. I can still get the font by other means but chose to use something else. I'm currently using Lato, which is fine and i'm getting used to it now, but i probably still prefer the look of Ubuntu. In the terminal i use Mononoki, have been using it for years now and haven't even felt the need to try anything else, i still love how it looks.
https://canonical.com/legal/font-licence
"This licence allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely."
It's not one of the normal licenses, and idk a lawyer. Why can't a distro include it?
According to https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/15792/debian-considers-the-ubuntu-font-family-non-free-why:
TBH to me that doesn't seem like strong enough grounds to not copy it manually to your Guix install, though I can see why distros might not want to package it. Canonical could probably have circumvented this issue by just using a more established license ... one has to wonder how much of this is sheer ignorance, and how much is calculated discouragement of using their fonts on other distros.
They go into a lot of detail here about why they forked an exisiting license, but i don't understand the copyright stuff.
https://canonical.com/legal/font-licence/faq
Sounds like they talked to a lot of people and then either purposefully ignored them, or just literally stopped putting any work into the font license after the release. The FAQ you linked claims that they tried improve on the standard SIL license by adding clarifications, but the Fedora bug thread that's linked in the Stackexchange answer looks like Canonical's license is actually considerably more ambiguous.
Yeah the other reply has a lot of good information, but it's also briefly mentioned on the wikipedia page. Debian and Fedora consider it to be non-free, and it's not FSF-approved.
The βregular kernelβ is not libre?
Yeah like the other reply said, most of the actual kernel is libre since its gpl licensed, but you still need firmware blobs for a lot of devices that are proprietary. The libre kernel is patched in such a way that they don't even allow you to load firmware if you wanted to, so you need the regular linux kernel for that.
Lots of proprietary drivers/firmware and helper-programs for those drivers. You can probably get more insight by checking out what's included in Debian's "non-free" and "contrib" repositories.