Comment 21 for bug 521163

(In reply to comment #10)
> As I said, I personally haven't heard any official licenses given from these
> font makers to use their fonts on a Linux desktop. If anyone install and use
> these fonts, it is very likely illegal. In another word, putting them in the
> conf files simply makes unlicensed use of commercial fonts easier, and of
> course, OSS font development projects will potentially lose users and feedback.
>
> In the long-run, Linux desktop needs more high-quality CJK fonts, and these
> fonts are less likely come from the commercial font makers, but the active OSS
> font projects. So, helping the commercial font makers to promote their fonts in
> the OSS community will eventually hurt linux desktop (by binding more and more
> users to the proprietary fonts).
>
> Plus, the current OSS CJK fonts are really on-par in quality with the
> commercial ones: WenQuanYi's bitmaps are of similar quality to commercial
> bitmaps, and more complete; "Droid Sans Fallback" from Google is really a
> professionally developed font bought from some Chinese company. WenQuanYi Zen
> Hei also performs very well on Linux desktop and progresses everyday with users
> feedback. As we now have plenty of choices with OSS fonts, I don't think making
> the commercial fonts use out-of-box will buy us any benefit.
>
> If CJK needs to give default support for commercial fonts, there are tons of
> commercial Latin fonts (like Arial, Helvetica ...) in the market, should we
> also pre-configue fontconfig for them as well...?

I still don't think making it unnecessarily hard for people who install fonts makes any sense. If there was *any* advantage, sure, but so far I fail to see one.