If you're programming support the libre community and certainly do not pay for fonts!
This is horrible logic.
Making a nice typeface takes man-years of work by highly trained professionals. The only way great work gets done is if someone can make a living at it.
Inconsolata is cute, but it was a hobby project of a mathematician / programmer, who used it as a concrete example while writing his PhD thesis about new mathematical models for vector graphics. It has a limited glyph subset, and many minor flaws which never got cleaned up, as you would expect from an unmaintained hobby project. (This is not intended as an insult; I think Inconsolata is great for what it is.)
Other commonly available monospaced typefaces were paid for by giant corporations like Microsoft/Apple/Google/etc. for their own ends (e.g. Google’s Roboto Mono and Droid Sans Mono, Adobe’s Source Code Pro, or Mozilla’s Fira Mono). In some cases (e.g. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, extended in various ways as Dejavu Mono, Panic Sans, Menlo, etc.), this work was generously donated (cf.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030206224515/http://www.gnome.org/pr-bitstreamfonts.html) but the font designers still had to eat and be paid a salary. Bitstream was basically giving up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of copyrights to the world.
In many other cases “libre” typefaces are just bad ripoffs of commercial work. The actual laws related to font licensing are a bit murky (commercial type foundries also release plenty of bad ripoffs), but at best this is ethically dubious business.
“Libre” is not a sustainable model for a whole type ecosystem, unless you’re relying on the patronage / good will of large corporations, who don’t in general prioritize users needs over their own, or unless you’re already happy with the options that exist and don’t care about ongoing improvement.
Directly paying for good work is the best way to support it.
