we were just contacted by a sales represantative from Monotype who informed us that we probably have to license several fonts used on our websites.
One of them was the font family “Proxima-Nova” (-Bold/-Reg/-Sbold) used on the Web GUI of Sonatype Nexus Repository Manager 3 OSS.
At the first glance, the request from Monotype seems legit and serious.
I checked this and in fact, proxima-nova is used by Nexus.
It is shipped even in the OSS as a plugin (“nexus-proximanova-plugin”).
I was able to disable it in the nexus-oss-feature-XML file.
Is there a smoother way to disable plugins than to edit the xml, so this will survive the next software upgrade?
And maybe more importantly:
Is it wise from sonatype to ship a billable font in their OSS version?
Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. We have investigated internally and our legal team has confirmed that Sonatype’s use of the Proxima Nova font in conjunction with Sonatype’s Nexus Repository application (including distribution with the Nexus Repository OSS binary) is in full compliance with the commercial licenses that Sonatype purchased in 2013 and 2014.
This is very good to know, I’ll forward this to our web service support and legal departments.
It’s also very good to have talked about this issue and to make this public, so most hopefully no one gets pressured or tricked into paying for a license that is already covered.