The article is vague, but OpenType CFF fonts remain supported. These are Type 1 outlines in an OpenType container. Type 1 fonts should be 1:1 convertible to OpenType CFF, techincally. The hitch for commerical users is that fonts often have ridiculously restrictive licensing forbidding this rewrapping.
If there's anything I've learned in my career, it's that almost no one even acknowledges the existence of font licensing, let alone abides by it. And in general it's usually the kind of thing that the "font police" has limited ability to discover from outside the business.
In practice, people will do what they need to do to use their software, and tbh, there may be legal exceptions for interoperability, such as the DMCA has. You're allowed to circumvent DRM, under DMCA, if you're doing so solely to enable interoperability with different software/hardware (rather than, in order to distribute it). Not a lawyer, don't @ me.
almost no one even acknowledges the existence of font licensing
Ha, that seems to imply that people even know there’s such a thing as font licensing.
I’ve been a graphic designer for a long time now, and I barely even remember font licensing exists. Even though I know better, my gut instinct is “well we paid for it, we can use it however we want internally, send it along with the InDesign file to the printer, why not?”
The super fun thing about fonts that isn't quite intuitive to most, is that once you rasterize them you're freed from all shackles, meaning you can use a $12 font license and make an iconic piece of art, print it out and sell 50,000,000 copies of it and make a billion dollars, and you're completely in the clear. Or even produce a JPEG and sell that the same way.
But if you make it into a webfont and render that same font in a browser as text, lawsuit city.
Depends on country. Font makers scanning magazines to check which ads use unlicensed font is a thing that exists. Also for TV. And often a TV license is different from a print license.
