Comment by catlover76
1 year ago
It's not just free? Instead it's $75 for an individual "license" and they sell enterprise licenses? Seems quite out of line with the vibe they portray the font embodies
1 year ago
It's not just free? Instead it's $75 for an individual "license" and they sell enterprise licenses? Seems quite out of line with the vibe they portray the font embodies
Where does one even get the idea that Unix = free (as in beer)? In fact, licenses for the original UNIX distros from Bell Labs retailed for literally thousands of dollars at the time. Various Unix-likes have names like FreeBSD for a reason.
I stand corrected, then, and have updated my comment accordingly
No, it's not free. Fonts are incredibly labor intensive and require both artistic and technical skill. $75 for a family of well designed fonts pretty much at the bottom of the barrel for paid fonts. Check out the pricing for a single variant of something like Helvetica or FF Meta some time. A single family may very well be someone's entire life's work. Same reason that you get paid to bang on a keyboard while open source exists.
That said I've not bought Berkeley Mono, and probably won't (mostly because the style isn't quite to my current taste). I've bought fonts in the past, typically drawing the piracy line when I make money from a font (e.g. letterhead, business cards). Over the past two decades the list includes: Bell Centennial and Bell Gothic (great at small sizes), FF Meta and FF Zwo (for copy), and FF Mister K (uses ligatures to create a more organic looking handwriting font).
Much like with other software there are great free alternatives that pop up every once in a while on HN when the topic of coding fonts comes up. Fira Code (by Erik Spiekermann of FF fame), Plex (IBM), Source Code (Adobe), Cascadia (Microsoft), and JetBrains Mono (duh). Notice that they're all backed by large orgs — again, fonts are a ton of work. Contrast that with something like B612 (Airbus) which is cool but also basically abandonware and lacks the fit and finish of the previous fonts.
If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains a collection of fonts scraped from vintage ROMs[0]. But again these lack the polish you may be used to as they're way out of their element on modern systems.
Me? I'm currently using M+ Code 60[1] (Coji Morishita backed by Google) as a daily driver[2]. I'm enamored with its slightly quirky style (just enough to keep me interested) and its legibility as a console font.
0: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
1: https://mplusfonts.github.io
2: https://i.imgur.com/AG2IbT0.png
> If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains a collection of fonts scraped from vintage ROMs.
In the US, bitmapped fonts are not covered by copyright, as they're considered to be digital representations of typefaces (which aren't covered either).
This is how the true UNIXen of yore were sold.