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FreeType Project Cheers TrueType Patent Expiration
FlorianMueller writes "The FreeType project celebrates the expiration of Apple's TrueType bytecode patents. The open source font rendering engine now has the bytecode technology enabled by default. The relevant code existed for some time, but the project felt forced to disable it and advise everyone not to use it due to patent encumbrance. The 20-year maximum of validity of software patents is long, but sometimes the stuff that becomes available is still useful. The Unisys GIF patent was an example. And anything open-sourced 20 years ago would also be patent-free by now (except for the code that has since been added)."
Congratulations on your purchase of a brand new nigger! If handled properly, your apeman will give years of valuable, if reluctant, service.
INSTALLING YOUR NIGGER.
You should install your nigger differently according to whether you have purchased the field or house model. Field niggers work best in a serial configuration, i.e. chained together. Chain your nigger to another nigger immediately after unpacking it, and don't even think about taking that chain off, ever. Many niggers start singing as soon as you put a chain on them. This habit can usually be thrashed out of them if nipped in the bud. House niggers work best as standalone units, but should be hobbled or hamstrung to prevent attempts at escape. At this stage, your nigger can also be given a name. Most owners use the same names over and over, since niggers become confused by too much data. Rufus, Rastus, Remus, Toby, Carslisle, Carlton, Hey-You!-Yes-you!, Yeller, Blackstar, and Sambo are all effective names for your new buck nigger. If your nigger is a ho, it should be called Latrelle, L'Tanya, or Jemima. Some owners call their nigger hoes Latrine for a joke. Pearl, Blossom, and Ivory are also righteous names for nigger hoes. These names go straight over your nigger's head, by the way.
CONFIGURING YOUR NIGGER
Owing to a design error, your nigger comes equipped with a tongue and vocal chords. Most niggers can master only a few basic human phrases with this apparatus - "muh dick" being the most popular. However, others make barking, yelping, yapping noises and appear to be in some pain, so you should probably call a vet and have him remove your nigger's tongue. Once de-tongued your nigger will be a lot happier - at least, you won't hear it complaining anywhere near as much. Niggers have nothing interesting to say, anyway. Many owners also castrate their niggers for health reasons (yours, mine, and that of women, not the nigger's). This is strongly recommended, and frankly, it's a mystery why this is not done on the boat
HOUSING YOUR NIGGER.
Your nigger can be accommodated in cages with stout iron bars. Make sure, however, that the bars are wide enough to push pieces of nigger food through. The rule of thumb is, four niggers per square yard of cage. So a fifteen foot by thirty foot nigger cage can accommodate two hundred niggers. You can site a nigger cage anywhere, even on soft ground. Don't worry about your nigger fashioning makeshift shovels out of odd pieces of wood and digging an escape tunnel under the bars of the cage. Niggers never invented the shovel before and they're not about to now. In any case, your nigger is certainly too lazy to attempt escape. As long as the free food holds out, your nigger is living better than it did in Africa, so it will stay put. Buck niggers and hoe niggers can be safely accommodated in the same cage, as bucks never attempt sex with black hoes.
FEEDING YOUR NIGGER.
Your Nigger likes fried chicken, corn bread, and watermelon. You should therefore give it none of these things because its lazy ass almost certainly doesn't deserve it. Instead, feed it on porridge with salt, and creek water. Your nigger will supplement its diet with whatever it finds in the fields, other niggers, etc. Experienced nigger owners sometimes push watermelon slices through the bars of the nigger cage at the end of the day as a treat, but only if all niggers have worked well and nothing has been stolen that day. Mike of the Old Ranch Plantation reports that this last one is a killer, since all niggers steal something almost every single day of their lives. He reports he doesn't have to spend much on free watermelon for his niggers as a result. You should never allow your nigger meal breaks while at work, since if it stops work for more than ten minutes it will need to be retrained. You would be surprised how long it takes to teach a nigger to pick cotton. You really would. Coffee beans? Don't ask. You have no idea.
MAKING YOUR NIGGER WORK.
Niggers are very, very averse to work of any kind. The nigger's most
:D
The open source font rendering engine now has the bytecode technology enabled by default. The relevant code existed for some time, but the project felt forced to disable it and advise everyone not to use it due to patent encumbrance.
The statement above makes me worried because it suggests that the Open Source Community could not find their way around these patents for two decades! Think about it....20 years!
That's enough time for an infant born at the time of patent filing to [legally] be a parent at its expiry...and that's a long time folks.
Didn't most distributions that shipped FreeType enable usage of TrueType fonts by default already, or am I misunderstanding this?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
My google-fu must be weak today: is there an example comparing small font sizes with and without the byte code interpreter enabled?
This may become the next drive where software patents are concerned. In much the same way that the H1-B programs get extended and increased while unemployment is hitting new highs, software patents stifle business and innovation and keep the courts systems over-burdened... we need more of it!
Apple apparently uses FreeType in the iPhone. Go to settings->General->Legal and you get the long list of projects uses in the iPhone; the Freetype project is mentioned about a third of the way down (right below the copyright notice for ncurses).
I suppose Apple had no issue recompiling with the flag turned on.
The code would be under copyright, but patent free. Not the same things. That mean you would not be able to COPY the code snippet, but you would be free to make your own implementation.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I wondered how a 'bytecode interpreter" based on static arrays would work as embedded into X11. It seems with this patent expiration, it would allow progress to continue actual deployment of any previous experiments. If we used some code from Wine and add it to a X11 backend, then think how much this could benefit bandwidth wise. It wouldn't be an easy first step except for this bytecode interpreter. A more extreme viewport on X11 would be a fully embedded Cairo surface, yet by that time we probably find exactly what can stay in the X11 process and what needs to stay in apps that use such a richer X11 display.
This isn't just an idea on a whim. There are already designs to add i7s right behind the pixel plane of monitors. With the 3D interconnect design of intel chips, you know what they are planning to do next (possible hint: Asetek prototype).
[They probably wouldn't call it X11 anymore.. maybe DirectX11. Not.]
Say Microsoft decided to enforce their double-click patent, how would you find a way around it?
Microsoft cannot be granted a patent on such a thing. What they could patent is the implementation of how events are handled by the system. So double clicking wouldn't be patentable. Under the patent regime today, what they could patent includes the method of effecting a [desired] change after double clicking.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Here's a side-by-side screenshot of Linux font rendering with and without the now patent-free byte code interpretation: http://avi.alkalay.net/2007/01/freetype-with-bytecode-interpreter.html
like they are Come Fo8 the record, I Come on b4by...and and the bottom see... The number
Copyright needs to be lowered. I find it amazing that huge industries were unable to extend the patent duration while the entertainment industries were able to extend this to over 100 years from the original 14+14 years.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Just because the patent expired doesn't make it great. Some of the stuff rendered with BCI almost makes me want to go back to bitmapped fonts. Or maybe it works well, but only with non-free fonts. If that's the case, here's hoping that free operating systems that use FreeType do NOT make this the default immediately.
Does anyone know how to enable with Freetype, the same kind of font appearance as apple does on OS X?
Some say apples font rendering is a bit more blurry, but I find it easier on the eyes than stock font rendering under linux.
Patents used to last 17 years after issue. But certain patent owners would employ dirty tricks to keep a patent in the "pending" state (filed but not issued). Now they last 20 years after filing, with an available 5-year extension for certain health care products to compensate for delays in getting the FDA's marketing approval. This greatly reduced the available techniques to keep a patent below water, though nonpracticing entities have discovered a few that still work.
U.S. copyright is longer because a copyright is far easier to work around than a patent is to invent around. The methods used in a computer program cannot be copyrighted (17 USC 102(b)). Only the expression can, and the key case for that was CA v. Altai. Names of commands were ruled uncopyrightable in Lotus v. Borland, allowing look-alikes and work-alikes of office applications such as OpenOffice.org. But two disturbing copyright interpretations remain: the uncertainty in the scope of copyright in video game scenarios (Atari v. Philips ruled for wide copyright; Capcom v. Data East ruled for narrow), and the possibility of accidentally infringing the copyright in a sequence of musical notes that someone else happened to claim first (Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs).
Easy, use a triple-click with an "accessibility" tolerance of +/- one click.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Well, Truetype BCI is useful but today most computer screens are LCD it isn't enough anymore, we also need a good subpixel rendering method, the one included in Freetype isn't so bad but isn't as good as Cleartype either. And the Cleartype code in freetype had been removed, unlike the BCI, which is only disabled, so we who don't live in the US can't use it either. (there are still a way to patch freetype though). I wonder how long will we have to wait until we can have nice looking fonts on Linux desktop.
Useful font stuff here:
http://linuxtweaking.blogspot.com/2010/03/fedora-12-improving-awful-font.html
I've just enabled byte code support on my laptop - makes a big difference.
AT&ROFLMAO
Well, it's simple: It gives good results if the designer of the font put considerable work into it (and the software correctly interprets it, but I assume that's the case). It gives terrible results if the font designer didn't. Now if it looks bad for free fonts, then I can imagine several possible causes:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If Freetype was under GPL3, however, this would still not be violation of their patents because they are the owner. Likewise, any GPL product that wants to include the patent would be allowed also, since the GPL3 license says that.
"Improvement". Um... no, the details of what makes the font appear distinctive area destroyed by "BCI". The fonts are not the same -- perhaps in terms of set-width, but not at all for typographic detail.
I guess "BCI" simply replaces the actual character forms with something else at lower pixel resolutions.
For example, look at the 13th line in the example - look at the lower case "c" and "d". Notice that the "BCI" version is considerably more open. Indeed, it has become a much more modern font! Note that kerning would then have to change -- since the bodies of the letters are significantly larger, keeping the kerning rules of the original font would result in a very squished look. (actually, I believe the opposite happens these days -- kerning will simply be ignored, or the kerning rules of a modern font such as Times Roman are applied, and the look of the printed copy allowed to deteriorate.)
At 300dpi resolution, it is very hard to produce proper fonts (I produced a very popular laser printer based proofing system in the 80s -- along with a complement of over 3,000 fonts, for typographers. Hinting at 300dpi did not give accurate enough results for the typographers of the time). At 600dpi it becomes a more reasonable proposition. At typical screen resolutions? Readability and font fidelity are not compatible for classical typefaces. "BCI" may be a solution for you, as long as you realize that what you are seeing on the screen is not actually reflected in print output.
In general, I recommend that screen fonts be chosen for legibility. Until display technology catches up to 600dpi or greater, you just won't get classical fonts to both reflect readability and artistic intent.
Using classic fonts as a primary display format for computer monitors is like viewing the Mona Lisa on a monitor encoded as a jpeg.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I'm still using bitmapped X fonts to this day, even in Firefox.
I much prefer hand-tuned, razor-sharp characters to "hinted", blury ones.
2.4.0 appears to be buggy so they have to re-release it as 2.4.1. Simply amazing ;-)
Lawyers make up the bulk of congress. Of course they just automatically rig the system to benefit their guild, and why this apparent need for millions more laws, and writing them in inane gibberish or "lawspeak". It's a conflict of interest, and it has resulted in a rapidly approaching non functional society, the governmental and also the business side, as in the example right here, nutso software patents, for "products" that already enjoy copyright protection. One or the other, but both is clearly just abuse of society in general and is hindering, not advancing, the useful arts and sciences.
Really? Celebrate over this? If your fonts looked like crap before you would have either enabled the flag and compiled it yourself or moved on to windows by now. Who the hell cares about the patent...
Another person confused on the difference between patent, trademark, and copyright.
Steamboat Willie gets a copyright extension because government is bought and paid for. Mickey Mouse will be a trademark as long as Disney exists. Neither of these are patents.
Mickey Mouse will be a trademark as long as Disney exists.
True, but at least in the United States, a trademark cannot be used to extend the exclusive rights in a copyrighted work past the copyright's expiration. Dastar v. Fox.
Are you referring to the Circular Transportation Facilitation Device? (google it). Has already been patented, in Australia.
I use Ubuntu, so, according to some here, I already enjoy the benefit of this hinting algorithm. But is this why PDFs viewed in xpdf look so bad, with fuzzy type, but in acroread look fine? Is acroread using this algorithm, but xpdf is not?