The fonts are no charge, but the OS they are in has to cost something

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/10/05 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/10/05/792889.aspx


The question that came in was deceptively simple:

Dear Sir,

I am in Cambodia. I need Daunpenh and Moolbaran fonts for Khmer Locale. Could you please send me that font to me?

Best regard,

 The answer is that I can't send out the fonts, they are a part of Vista (and I believe Office 2007), and the way to get them is to get the OS and/or product that they come with. I really can't violate the licensing agreement that is on the fonts, which would (if bought on their own from a font foundry) would (and did) cost a lot more than a copy of Windows -- in some cases more than 1,000 copies of Windows. Given that fact and the fact that hundreds of megabytes of other language support is also in that folder, they really do come at a pretty reasonable price (just like the proofing tools).

 Sorry about that. :-(

 

This post brought to you by (U+17ac, a.k.a. KHMER INDEPENDENT VOWEL RYY)


# Igor on 11 Oct 2006 10:33 PM:

And along with fonts, IE and Media Player are also for free but the price of OS includes them.

Seriously, none of those are actually free since Microsoft pays developers to work on those components. That is why people here in Europe get upset over bundling.

# Michael S. Kaplan on 11 Oct 2006 11:53 PM:

But people in Europe need to learn the lesson here --  there is no charge for the bundling itself, and there is no way to make it cheaper than the price it is.

Any mature adult who does not want to just slam MS for the sport can understand this if they are willing to. Otherwise, they are just looking for a reason to call Microsoft evil so they can think of this as keeping them from having to work as hard to find things to hate. :-)


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2008/10/13 Tamil language support in Windows? You can't SHRII-k yet, but it's getting better

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