In reply to Font license dissertation opinions:
Are you making a clear distinction between free fonts with commercial licensing, such as those released by foundries to promote a larger family (e.g., Museo from Exljbris and Lido from Storm), those which have no license or only a vague indication of how they can be used (e.g, "Free for Personal Use") and fonts which employ a range of established open source licensing models such as the SIL OFL, GNU GPL with font exception, Apache, MIT, etc...?
All of the above are frequently misused and misunderstood, particularly in commercial environments. Quality and integrity are major issues in all of these cases and no easy sweeping statements will cover every circumstance and eventuality. Also, as many people have pointed out in other threads, what retail costs may be saved by using "free" fonts are often picked up in other ways, such as time and effort in working around poor design and execution, and in many cases the realisation that there is a very good reason why people charge for licensing professional, beautifully crafted and engineered fonts.