Hacker News Reader

Comment by fafner | Hacker News Reader

At least they added Comic Neue. I'm a bit disappointed that a project like OpenBSD that is so vocal about free software is promoting a proprietary font like Comic Sans MS.

View on HN

Not sure if whooshed, but just in case anyone else doesn't get it, you're not going to see Comic Sans unless you load it from a Windows machine or a Unix distribution that's installed the font. IOW, it's just a gentle jab at Microsoft and perhaps those distributions that install the MS fonts. Technically that is promotion in name but not spirit.

Well the OpenBSD devs seem to use Comic Sans in their presentations though

E.g., http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ru13-deraadt/index.html

You're right, they use it as a weapon of snark and for fund raising:

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00025.htm...

You'll see it on the Mac, too, since the MS web fonts are installed by default.

You are correct. I assumed MS Office put it there, not even considering that Comic Sans would be on OSX by default. Hah! It's an even more sublime statement now, as only the untainted free distributions out there don't see it.. and it's also directed at web hipsters, but the result there appears to be unintentionally ironic.

They're not promoting the font at all. Non-windows users will never noticed that the defined font is Comic Sans (unless inspecting the CSS).

That's the entire joke, to jokingly annoy windows users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com