Most Linux users soon hear of the influence of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in the development of free software. However, fewer have heard of the influence of the SIL Open Font License, although it is as important for design as the GPL has been for software. Just as the GPL is responsible for the development of free software, so the SIL Open Font License enabled the rise of the free font movement, making Linux a practical choice for designers and artists. Today, it is the most popular free license for fonts, although few know its story.

Today, many distributions install with a variety of fonts, some for enabling multiple languages, and others for design. Yet, until the early years of the millennium, fonts were an afterthought in free software. Free licensed fonts were packaged in most distributions, but they were intended for on-screen display, particularly in terminals. The emphasis was on monospaced fonts – fonts whose letters all took up exactly the same space – the kind familiar at the command line. If the quality was generally poor, no one minded, because the fonts were good enough for on-screen viewing, and most people using them were developers, not designers.

Around the turn of millennium, the needs of users started to change. For one thing, Gimp had developed to the point that it could be used for professional work. Just as importantly, in July 2000, Sun Microsystems released the StarDivision [1] code that became OpenOffice.org, and later Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, giving free software its first full office system. According to rumor, the StarDivision developers were told that they would have to use the Writer word processor to document their work, which meant that free software also had its first intermediate desktop publisher.

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