It's kind of funny how there is all that talk on the page about a new "humanist" font and important typographic and aesthetical considerations - and in the end, the entire reason for this were licensing fees...

But on that note, can you really call it your "own" font if the differences to your "inspiration" are so tiny you literally need to overlay the texts to even see them?

I'm not a copyright lawyer, but wouldn't this be a textbook example of a "derived work"? The page also explicitly mentions the relationship to the base fonts several times, so it's not even hidden.

Did the owners of Whitney SSm demand outrageous license fees, but also permitted unrestricted creation of derived works in their license? That would seem like a massive oversight on their part.

Also, not a typography nerd, but what is the wider utility of now having three fonts that are barely distinguishable from each other and only exist to evade each other's licensing restrictions?