The interesting thing is that one part of the optimization for finance was all those special fraction glyphs. I have never seen such weird fractions in actual use, I would have thought people use normal decimal numbers everywhere.
When I worked at Bloomberg, the origins of that font weren't a mystery. I used it on my company-issued Mac and loved it. Whatever they paid for it, the price was definitely worth it.
I don't suppose I'll ever find a suitable replacement, which also means that I jump at every opportunity to try out a new monospace font. I currently have 7 in my .Xdefaults, and these are just the ones I kinda-sorta liked and hadn't deleted.
Which is kind of the opposite experience many people have who work at a company that has its 'company font' which they are supposed to use, but nobody likes to, because it's just print-optimized for design etc, but not screen-optimized for normal work use, and thus makes it a pain to edit documents.
It's one of those rare situations when programmers can benefit from the development of a product meant to please an entirely orthogonal audience: uber-picky finance professionals who stare at screens all day. Life is fascinating, isn't it?
I've considered doing just that, but it wouldn't be the right thing to do. I don't want to make money using something that technically isn't mine to use.
Out of curiosity, I just installed Bloomberg Professional (all 2GB+ of it; contrary to the Quora post, the font package won't run by itself, you have to install the entire program), copied the fonts, and uninstalled it. At no point was I shown any sort of licensing agreement or terms of service. I fell no moral obligation to refrain from local use of some fonts that Bloomberg offered me for free.
Not actually true. When you install the software required for the addons to install, it says quite clearly:
> The software contained herein (the "Software") is made available to you ("You") solely pursuant to the terms of the agreement that You previously entered into with Bloomberg ("Bloomberg Agreement"). IF YOU HAVE NOT ENTERED INTO THE BLOOMBERG AGREEMENT, YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, RUN AND/OR OPERATE THE SOFTWARE OR ANY PORTION THEREOF IN ANY MANNER WHATSOEVER.
I suppose in the long run, as long as you aren't redistributing it or making a profit off its use, Bloomberg considers its data more valuable than its terminal software or fonts. After all, they do make it publicly available for download without a license agreement. (Shakes fist at Oracle/Sun...)
Disclaimer: I work for Bloomberg building out the infrastructure used to power the Terminal and was involved in the project creating the font from the beginning.
Bloomberg commissioned the custom-designed font from Matthew Carter[1] (Verdana/Tahoma/Georgia fame) because we outgrew the ancient simple bitmap font that was used since the software was moved to run on Windows. A lot of time and effort went into creating it. The font is actually not our property (it does contain other glyphs not created as part of the project and owned by "large type foundry X") and we are granted a license to distribute the font to our customers in our software.
I just wanted to point out that this type of thing comes up all the time and is misunderstood by most people who are used to using FOSS. We can't give away what we do not own, so the license restrictions are not necessarily because we're selfish and don't want something to be open, but because there are actual license fees, contracts, etc. signed with the owner backing it all up. As for why the owner ultimately does not want it to be free -- they are a type foundry and are in the business of selling fonts.
(It's a separate discussion, but this also usually applies to data as well as fonts.)
Typeface designs are not copyrightable-- there's nothing stopping me from looking at (for example) Futura, redrawing it, and selling the redrawn version myself. (Coincidentally, Futura itself, as a popular pre-digital era typeface, has been independently digitized several times by different companies.)
Font files, meaning the specific binary files implementing a typeface on your computer, most certainly are copyrightable and licensable. If I were to purchase Myriad from Adobe, I couldn't just hand that font over to you-- that would be against the license agreement and would qualify as software piracy.
(This is all based on US copyright; YMMV if you're elsewhere.)
As @elcapitan said, licensing is the same as for software. Fonts are intellectual property (IP), just like most other intangible products of R&D. It is too bad, of course, and my usual opinion about IP applies. However, we don't live in an ideal world, and many of us are stuck following rules we don't agree with.
What I'd personally find more interesting is a first-principles research effort to find out what makes some fonts so much better than others. My gut tells me that such an effort might yield, as a side effect, a formal method for creating such fonts that are especially well suited for a specific purpose.
