Slashdot Mirror
Truth Behind the ClearType/OpenSUSE FUD
Kennon writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols over at Linux Watch clears up the FUD around Tuesday's Slashdot discussion concerning OpenSUSE, ClearType, and patent deals with Microsoft."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I think ClearType is a great idea
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
To come up with an idea, prevent others from working on it, and to claim all work in the area as their own property. And make claims of future work as well: "more patents to come." Sounds like pirating to me. Microsoft is raping and pillaging the software community.
This change was last summer, pre-microvell, so the news actually would have been if OpenSUSE was enabling it and taking advantage of MS' patent covenant for Novell customers and OpenSUSE contributors while other distros couldn't.
MS' plan to fragment the community is only effective if Novell has customers and developers supporting them, otherwise the covenant is irrelevant. Boycott Novell, the rest takes care of itself.
--10scjed IANAL,AFAIK
So it would seem that the disabling of FreeType is more coincident than anything else. It's possible for parallel processes to affect the same thing but have no overt connection.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
--10scjed IANAL,AFAIK
The problem isn't sub-pixel rendering in general (if it was, any anti-aliasing feature would be covered by these patents). ClearType is taking avantake of the way of drawing pixels LCDs use (red, green, blue standing next to each other instead of being mixed together) to increase anti-aliasing even further. This technology is LCD-specific and patented by Microsoft.
- 1991: Word for Windows 2.0
- 1992: Excel 4.0
- 1993: Visual Basic 3.0
- 1996: Windows NT 4.0
- 2001: ClearType
Notice any clustering of the dates? With hundreds of billions in revenue, all they can produce in over a decade is ClearType? Let them have it -- we'll live with seeing our font pixels.Ballmer asked his lawyers for a patent on his peener
The prototype was quarter scale and looked like a pipe cleaner
Prior art be damned! He told the counsels - get to working!
I can prove it's novel just by bellowing and jerking!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Since when is disagreeing with a companies business decisions not a good reason to stop using their products? That's kinda the only way for the public at large to keep corporations even remotely close to ethical (not that it always works). You may not agree that Novell has done anything worth boycotting them for, but isn't that up to their customers (in this case Linux users) to decide? You make your choice, and even try to make others see it your way, but don't knock the system. It may not be perfect, but it's all we got.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
There seems to be a confusion of terminology in the above, but I admit I may be misreading it.
Anti-aliasing is not the same thing as sub-pixel rendering, which is orthogonal to anti-aliasing and can be (and almost always is) combined with it.
Anti-aliasing is merely the use of different shades to adjust the sharpness of object boundaries, where the shade is based upon the amount of a pixel the objects covering that pixel would intersect. While this sounds like something that would be describable by the term "sub-pixel rendering" if, for a moment, you assume you would divide the pixel into smaller virtual pixels to calculate the end result, that's not what sub-pixel rendering refers to. The term "sub-pixel" is not being used to describe these smaller "virtual pixels".
In an LCD a pixel is made up of three "sub-pixels": real, discrete, lighting elements that together illuminate one complete pixel. The sub-pixels are the three primary colours and are almost always mounted side by side as three thin strips. Sub-pixel rendering is the technique of using the separate red, green, and blue sub-pixels of an LCD "pixel" in isolation to improve the sharpness of object boundaries. When used, the screen effectively has an increased horizonal resolution of 3x the regular resolution, so a 1400x1050 screen effectively becomes 4200x1050.
It is usually, if not always, used in conjunction with regular anti-aliasing (though technically it doesn't need to be.)
Microsoft's patents, as I understand it, cover the latter, and in particular focus on preventing "colour fringing" that is otherwise a major downside of using sub-pixel rendering.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
From Wikipedia:
The first light pen was used around 1957 on the Lincoln TX-0 computer at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.Gibson was born in 1955. That's some fast work!
First off, despite the popularity of bashing SuSE these days, most or all "purist" linux distros do the same thing, this is not just a Novell/SuSE issue. By "purist", I am referring to distros which try to stay as close to 100% open source and patent-infringment-free as possible. Fedora is the prime example of such a distro, even more so than SuSE. On whole, fedora is even more conservative than SuSE, and also has Freetype compiled in its non-patent-infringing way, yet, hypocritically, none of the SuSE bashers are bashing Fedora over this.
Second, the deal between Novell and Microsoft regarding patents was an agreement not to sue Novell's customers over patent infringement. While this might be viewed as a "patent license", it is not an explicit license and thus very limited. The implication is that it would only cover inadvertent patent violations, for example by redistributing someone elses software. Novell probably still has an obligation not to infringe any patents that it has not been granted an explicit license to use.
Microsoft may have a patent on ClearType, but they didn't invent it. We did the same thing in the Commodore 64 days with regards to fonts in graphics. I clearly recall zooming in on text and seeing different colors in the transition from text to background. I've spent many hundred hours doing graphic arts on the Commodore 64 and have been published.
I guess prior art doesn't apply to patents anymore?
"Sub-pixel font rendering with Free&Clear - Microsoft says they invented their "ClearType" technology, but I quickly and independently "invented" the same thing . . . as had others who came years before. It is very cool, but rather obvious. "
http://www.grc.com/ct/cleartype.htm
Mod parent up! That is exactly right and the full scope can be found on Steve Gibson's ClearType pages. What they have patented is simple filtering of sub-pixel rendering. That is just a simple combination of two very old techniques, color filtering is used in everything from blur filters to fire effects to texture mapping. Sub-pixel rendering too, has been used for ages to increase the apparent screen resolution.
Football Odds
Gibson have a "Who Did It First?" text regarding sub-pixel rendering as well:
http://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm
Not all countries recognise software patents, so i assume this patents doesnt apply in all countries.
Why do we force software patents on people who live in non-software patent countries ?
Petty politics or genuine concern that Microsoft and Novell are preparing to give the FLOSS community a good shafting? It's all in the semantics.
No. That agreement is tantamount to Novell saying: 'yes, GNU/Linux does infringe upon Microsoft patents.' It gives Ballmer evidence to extort money from GNU/Linux users, will probably be used in future lawsuits by Microsoft and has been the basis of much anti-GNU/Linux FUD.
What is particularly bad for the community is the indemnity stops with the Novell customers, the development community is very much left out in the cold. I'm scared of releasing my code under a FLOSS license because of patent FUD. It might be an indemnity agreement, but it's a thinly veiled threat too.
You speak of choice, yet the Microsoft/Novell deal has taken customers away from other distros (for all the wrong reasons). The whole point of the deal is to eliminate choice and leave Microsoft with just one competitor to deal with: Novell.
If a company kills babies, I'm not going to buy their products. In fact I'll actively make others aware of their actions, this is not petty, I would consider it my moral duty. As a geek Novell and Microsoft have done something far worse: gone against the spirit (if not the letter) of the GPL. It is therefore my moral duty to boycott their products and advise everyone (who would know what I'm talking about) to do the same.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
It's interesting because the patent combines 2 existing techniques to increase apparent resolution on a hardware display. I'd argue firstly that it isn't novel, the only reason MS were able to get this patent is because early LCD costs were prohibitively expensive. That prevented the wider hacker community from "inventing" (sic) this first.
Secondly, it's a patent on pure software, simply optimizing output for a specific display type.
It's not as if FreeType and MS' are the only subpixel technologies around; OS X has had it since version 10.3. Microsoft's isn't even particularly good, compared to the others.
At least the brouhaha, while a waste of energy and attention like all FUD, is strong evidence, if any more were required, that software patents are a bad idea.
you had me at #!
You can't sue an end user for patent infringement because they're not selling it or making a profit off of it. And if they are selling it, they're no longer the end user.
Its perfectly legal---and theoretically, encouraged---to take a patent and use it to build the system at home. Theoretically, patents are to be in such detail that the invention they patent may be recreated from the patent.
IANAL.
ClearType works wonderfully on my LCDs, much better with it enable than without it enabled. Worked wonderfully on my CRTs, when I used them, as well. Others report different results. Results, therefore, may vary.
Well except the sub pixel anti-aliasing they claim as their invention was invented by Steve Wozniak a couple of decades earlier.
I think it was even earlier than that, there were some links in yesterday's discussion to what looks like exactly the same feature, being investigated by Xerox even earlier. The prior art on at least the most general concepts of this (subpixel rendering by switching on individual Red, Green, or Blue color elements in a display) seems pretty damning.
But then again, the prior art against Microsoft's FAT patents was pretty damning too, and it even went through two USPTO reviews that said the patents should be invalidated, but at the 11th hour there was an additional review and suddenly they were "novel and non-obvious" again. Makes you wonder exactly Microsoft has by the short hairs that made a phone call to smooth things over... If they really need these patents, they'll never be overturned regardless of the obviousness of the prior art; the patent system is too thoroughly corrupt.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."