A lack of fonts? No. A lack of high-quality, relatively-complete, free fonts? Absolutely.
Free fonts usually come in one width, two weights (regular and bold) and two styles (roman and italic), for a total of four variations, and usually cover the Latin alphabet plus a few relatively-common variants (accented characters for western European languages, and maybe a couple of additional characters like the the German eszett or the Icelandic eth).
Professional fonts will often come with perhaps five weights (light through black), three widths (condensed, normal, wide), and two styles, for a total of thirty variants. Some will also come in different optical sizes, or have other variable properties. Additionally, they'll have much larger character coverage (perhaps including Cyrillic or Greek), and have multiple stylistic variations of individual characters (stylistic alternates, swashes, old-style figures, etc.), as well as ligatures of commonly-colliding pairs of characters like "fi." Professional fonts can thus have literally thousands of times more glyphs, are very labor-intensive to produce, and are fairly expensive.
This font is certainly less rich than most of Adobe's "Pro" line of fonts, but still looks much better than a lot of what's out there in terms of open source type.
While I agree with your basic argument, I think you’re overstating the case a little. As services like Google Web Fonts have become popular, several very good, free, and reasonably comprehensive font families have become available.
For example, the most popular sans on GWF is currently Open Sans, which does come in a wider range of weights and has italic and condensed versions available. Unlike this new font family from Adobe, Open Sans also renders well on Windows, including Windows XP and including all major browsers when used as a web font.
I thought GWF were doing some processing to make the fonts work better on Windows? They way I understood it they were running the auto-hinter that Linux would use and then storing the hints inside the font for use by Windows. If that's true then the version hosted by Google (at least) should also look better than the complete disaster you get with entirely unhinted fonts at small sizes.
On the specimens there, Source Sans looks terrible at almost any sensible body text size in Firefox on Windows XP.
However, I was comparing those results with samples of Open Sans from Google Web Fonts, which look much better. Apologies if this wasn’t a fair comparison.
Plus, while there are a lot of 'free' fonts online most of them are licensed such that you can't embed them in your app. From my understanding (IANAL) the SIL open font licence DOES allow you to embed and redistribute.
No problem. I think any field that has a community of people devoted to it full time gets pretty intense after awhile. If you're still curious, check out some hangouts for type designers, like http://typophile.com/
Free fonts usually come in one width, two weights (regular and bold) and two styles (roman and italic), for a total of four variations, and usually cover the Latin alphabet plus a few relatively-common variants (accented characters for western European languages, and maybe a couple of additional characters like the the German eszett or the Icelandic eth).
Professional fonts will often come with perhaps five weights (light through black), three widths (condensed, normal, wide), and two styles, for a total of thirty variants. Some will also come in different optical sizes, or have other variable properties. Additionally, they'll have much larger character coverage (perhaps including Cyrillic or Greek), and have multiple stylistic variations of individual characters (stylistic alternates, swashes, old-style figures, etc.), as well as ligatures of commonly-colliding pairs of characters like "fi." Professional fonts can thus have literally thousands of times more glyphs, are very labor-intensive to produce, and are fairly expensive.
This font is certainly less rich than most of Adobe's "Pro" line of fonts, but still looks much better than a lot of what's out there in terms of open source type.