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by mark-r 2761 days ago
Nimbus Sans was designed to be a complete lookalike for Helvetica. I'm not sure how they got away with it, except that the IP laws protecting fonts are rather weak.

Besides, I don't think it's open source.

1 comments

Nimbus Sans is not a lookalike for Helvetica, it is a Helvetica. The visual appearance of fonts is not copyrightable. And it's GPL'd.
What does it mean for a font to be GPL? Does it carry the license along into any project you use that font in?
The GPL version was produced to be included with Ghostscript, which itself is GPL, so that wasn't an issue. I'd be very wary of using it with any other project.
That sounds like FUD.