First off all, these fonts are not "free" as in "free software", they are owned by Microsoft and to use them you have to agree to a Microsoft EULA (technically, though this isn't enforced). They're "free as in beer", not "free as in freedom" (this is my understanding at least, welcome to be corrected on this point).
Second: the objection isn't necessarily just that Verdana is free, it's that it's not a very good-looking font. Certainly in most people's opinion, it's nothing like as cool as Futura. IKEA, a massive multi-national company and an iconic brand, can and should do better. They say they did this to "align print and web", presumably meaning they wanted to use a font that was guaranteed to work in all browsers, but that's such a shame for print, really sacrificing great typography on the altar of browser support.
Third: font design is an art and a craft just like graphic design, photography, furniture design, script-writing, music production, whatever. There are certainly people who think literally everything should be free (as in "every Hollywood release should be Creative Commons"), but that's a rather extreme position. If you think it's a good thing that IKEA pays graphic designers to design their catalog, and furniture designers to design their furniture, you should think it's a good thing that IKEA pays typographers for their typeface design.
There are certainly issues with licensing in the world of typeface design (the emerging Monotype monopoly is really disturbing, for instance), but expecting giant companies to pay for good typography instead of using bad free typography is not some "anti-free software" stance.
You can pay a font designer a fixed fee to create a font, just like you pay a programmer a fixed fee to work on Linux. Could be even $1 mil / font.
But perpetual licensing for a font, why?
Verdana/Futura, what about familiarity? Verdana is certainly more familiar to more people than Futura, and we know from psychology that familiarity has an impact in everything we do.
What if IKEA switched to Verdana because studies show that it's "better" for sales? Surely paying for Futura is a rounding error in their balance sheet.
Sometimes, something that seems like an "obviously terrible decision" to subject matter experts turns out to be inconsequential, or perhaps even good. Ask a corporate identity expert in 1998 if you should name your big important company "Google" and they'd vomit in your face. Of course it looks very different in hindsight.
In much the same way, I'd argue that the Verdana typeface was a bolder and significantly more distinctive choice compared to something safe and well-trodden like Futura. Despite Verdana's widespread use on the web, approximately nobody had ever dared to use it in the way IKEA did, making it utterly distinctive.
Personally I think IKEA's shift to Noto was disappointing. At their scale they could have easily paid a type designer to make an IKEA Sans, inspired by Verdana, perhaps taking some cues from the likes of Raleway or Suisse Screen.
Sweden Sans only has characters used in Swedish; IKEA is global and needs glyphs for most latin languages, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (traditional and simplified).
Second: the objection isn't necessarily just that Verdana is free, it's that it's not a very good-looking font. Certainly in most people's opinion, it's nothing like as cool as Futura. IKEA, a massive multi-national company and an iconic brand, can and should do better. They say they did this to "align print and web", presumably meaning they wanted to use a font that was guaranteed to work in all browsers, but that's such a shame for print, really sacrificing great typography on the altar of browser support.
Third: font design is an art and a craft just like graphic design, photography, furniture design, script-writing, music production, whatever. There are certainly people who think literally everything should be free (as in "every Hollywood release should be Creative Commons"), but that's a rather extreme position. If you think it's a good thing that IKEA pays graphic designers to design their catalog, and furniture designers to design their furniture, you should think it's a good thing that IKEA pays typographers for their typeface design.
There are certainly issues with licensing in the world of typeface design (the emerging Monotype monopoly is really disturbing, for instance), but expecting giant companies to pay for good typography instead of using bad free typography is not some "anti-free software" stance.