This pretty much slipped under the radar…
Red Hat have provided the FOSS community with ‘drop in replacements’ for the main fonts provided by ‘msttcorefonts’ (Arial, Times New Roman et al). They have done this “to say thank you to all our friends in the open source community for all you have done to make us successful.” Which is awfully nice. These fonts are provided under GPLv2 + 2 exceptions (not sure exactly why these are required).
Announcement: Here
There was an initial effort for packaging these for repository ‘Universe’ HERE - But from my understanding Debian’s font ‘task-force’ are also packaging it - but are concerned about a licensing issue that they are trying to deal with upstream (Red-Hat). So i’ll probably nuke my package.
 EDIT:
Although the package hasn’t been officially released due to the above problems. Debian’s pre-released package is available here, It should work without any problems. However, not being an official package the normal ‘health warning’ applies.
May 18th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Fonts need GPL exceptions for situations where they are used (technically as a library iirc) in a document that may be a private/confidential/proprietry document.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:04 am
Yes, certain aspects of the exceptions are problematic.
Forcing a particular license on the content is really less than ideal.
But thankfully the RedHat folks are willing to discuss this and find a better way.
See the end of this article:
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/05/16/1318240
May 23rd, 2007 at 7:54 pm
[...] Redhat have just released some new fonts, that have been designed to replace the 3 most commonly used Microsoft fonts.. Times New Roman®, Arial® and Courier New®. This is great news as Microsoft refuses to allow others to license or distribute these fonts, which stops people from using them to create truly open documents. A lot of web sites still use these fonts too, which can cause trouble for Linux users, who are forced to download & install the official fonts before they can view the web sites. The legality of this is very worrying & this stops these fonts from being installed on any Linux distribution as standard. You can check out the full news story here & download an unofficial Ubuntu package from Dave Walkers blog here. [...]