[KeenFox]

Related: the US government has its own font. The page mentions it further down.

https://public-sans.digital.gov/

Discussion of the font on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607371

[velcrovan]

This font is even more interesting because it of its extremely uncertain copyright/licensing situation:

“Open-source licenses, like all software licenses, are only possible through assertion of copyright. Certain free-software advocates prefer to sidestep this inconvenient fact (akin to ‘keep your government hands off my Medicare’). For individual software authors, this usually poses no problem, because their copyright arises at the moment the work is created. Thus, they’re free to put their work under any license, including an open-source license.

“But US government employees are a special case. As a matter of federal law (17 USC § 105), they can’t assert copyright in their work. Public Sans is an inseparable mixture of copyrighted work (= the underlying Libre Franklin font) and uncopyrightable work (= the alterations made by the GSA). The GSA currently claims that Public Sans has been released under the OFL. But that’s impossible. To use this license, they’d first need to have a copyright in their contributions. But they don’t.”

— Matthew Butterick (type designer + lawyer) https://tinyletter.com/mbutterick/letters/the-curious-case-o...

[acdha]

His position is not common and there's a long history of U.S. government lawyers approving participation in open-source projects under licenses which are not the public domain — e.g. SELinux is under the GPL because the original Linux kernel was and the NSA's lawyers approved that contribution.

Here's the upstream issue:

https://github.com/uswds/public-sans/issues/30

He also opened a separate issue claiming an Establishment clause violation because the OFL was created by https://www.sil.org/about:

https://github.com/uswds/public-sans/issues/31

[KeenFox]

I'm not sure of the practical implications for someone looking to use it in a design project. Who would have standing to sue for infringement, and in what situations?

[anentropic]

I came here to say... that body text font renders really nicely on my screen