Bitstream was far from the only offender. URW and numerous other companies have made identical looking digital clones of well known typefaces. The law basically said a type designer can't copyright or trademark a letter shape, but they can do so with the name of the typeface. I've seen a lot of look-alike fonts since the early 1990's. The ones from Bitstream weren't great by today's standards of big character sets and lots of advanced typographical features. But they were drawn a good bit more cleanly than the fonts in some truly junky retail packages sold in computing and office supply stores back then. Some of those fonts were really messy and crude, almost as if they had been auto-traced.
There is also the issue of various type companies releasing their own flavors of a well-known typeface. Take Futura for instance. There are versions of it from Linotype, URW, Neufville Digital, ParaType, Elsner+Flake, Bitstream (of course) and others. Then there are variations like Futura Maxi, Futura Futuris, Futura Headline, Futura Text, etc. I really like Variable Fonts so I bought a copy of Futura Now when Monotype introduced it (and a big price discount was available).
None of these variants of Futura line up perfectly with each other if you superimpose the letters. One foundry's take on Futura Book isn't going to be exactly the same as another. If they were perfectly identical, such as one company simply copying another company's font data and renaming it, then there would be serious legal trouble. It would fall into the area of software piracy. These slight differences between fonts of the same name can be a real hazard if you're doing something like replacing damaged letters on a lighted channel letter building sign and you don't have the original art files. It's possible those Futura letters up there on the building were from a Bitstream variant bundled into CorelDRAW. Linotype's cut of Futura is also very common, as is the one from URW. The problem is compounded worse by people artificially distorting the letters out of their normal proportions (a practice I really dislike). In many instances we're forced to make patterns and hand cut the replacement letter faces.
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