> maybe you can help me here, because I am not sure that I understand > why fonts are software.
It's a legal trick: vector fonts are programs for drawing shapes of letters. The shapes cannot be copyrighted in the USA while the programs can. Fonts clearly are works for practical use. Some reasons to share them: being a good neighbor, collaborating with friends on a document to be printed, using them to make a document more legible (there are "special" fonts for documents with mathematics or that might be photocopied), being able to format a document for your paper format (this usually needs more data than is embedded in the document). Reasons to modify them: supporting special symbols (math papers need many symbols), supporting minority languages (like Charis SIL: it's based on a free font), fixing bugs.
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