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

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.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Carter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Carter