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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)."
No, that makes this a worthy patent, like the RSA patent. All those other patents that can be easily worked around, those are the bad patents.
Yes, in a business where most things are considered obsolete after 5 years, and ancient at 10, a 20 year patent life time is extremely excessive.
It is sad to see that countries and regions (EU) who do not (officially) allow software patents, are working on legislation to enable them.
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 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 is not what the article says. What it says is that the patent was filed 20 years ago, and that the freetype library included the code that infringed on that patent "for some time".
What would "find a way around these patents" be? With software patents, that patent a "method" of doing something, it's quite hard to be able to find a way around them. Say Microsoft decided to enforce their double-click patent, how would you find a way around it? Basically, no other software would be able to use the double click input method without paying Microsoft for a patent license.
The EFF fights against many of the enforced software patents, trying to prove that there was prior art and that the patent was actually invalid when it was granted. If the patent was actually valid, there's not much you could do.
That's how it is, that's why we hate software patents.
Margarita Manterola.
The bytecode in question is about hinting and gridfitting (try Googling those terms): it tells the rendering engine (e.g. FreeType) how to scale fonts at small sizes so they look good. By default, FreeType just scaled text down, which can make it hard to read at small sizes and give blurry edges. Although it did make some efforts to guess what would make good grid alignment decisions, they couldn't used the wealth of information that some fonts' designers painstakingly design into their work by default. It's one of the reasons why fonts on Linux look like crap at small sizes, especially with antialiasing turned off. (Remember that Windows never had problems when fonts were just displayed as black and white!)
could not find their way around these patents for two decades
Sure, there was a way around the patents: be incompatible with TrueType.
That's how PNG was invented to work around the patents on GIF.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Not necessarily. What if there is one obvious way to solve a problem and it gets a patent? Ridiculous example: If someone had gotten a patent for "circular apparatus that facilitates low friction locomotion" there might not have been much to do but wait out the 20 years.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
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
Well at least New Zealand seems to be moving in the right direction on that topic.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Slashdot really needs a moderation score of "-1 Incoherent"
There's this image (left without bytecode, right with) I found which has a comparison for a number of fonts, but the site mentions that other patches were also included, so it may not be entirely representative. Perhaps someone else can find a better example.
Sure, there was a way around the patents: be incompatible with TrueType.
But then how would you get the major foundries on board without being compatible with the two major desktop PC operating systems?
I think the problem is that the wrong examiners handle some obvious patents. Something that may be obvious to a software developer may not be obvious to someone with only a degree in chemistry and a single undergrad programming course (and vice versa) and once a patent has been granted it's a pain in the ass to get rid of it even if there is prior art so everyone just kind of seems to hope that those who get such patents granted realize that they'd be useless in a serious legal battle (against someone with the resources to find the prior art or demonstrate how the patent would be obvious to anyone in the field).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
If it's obvious, it's not supposed to be patentable. Unfortunately, the examiners seem to let a lot of obvious things slip through, but that covers your scenario.
Why don't you go tell the meso-american civilizations that the wheel is obvious?...
A big problem is it's very difficult to judge obviousness, something that would be obvious to someone who has spent some time working on the same problem won't nessacerlly be obvious to a patent examiner. After the fact it's even harder.
Another big problem is those soloutions which aren't particularlly obvious but where there is only a very small number (sometimes only one) of good soloutions which are likely to be found eventually by multiple parties. Lightbulbs are a good example of this, both edison and swan came to the same conclusion on how to make a usable filament at about the same time independently.
And a final big problem is cases where you have to use a patented method not because it's the only or even the best soloution to the underlying problem but because it's the soloution compatible with what everyone else is doing.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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).
Thanks to the free market, there would be no incentive for someone with such a patent to just sit on it for a number of years, unless they also held (and licensed) a patent for "mammalian apparatus of equine variety that facilitates locomotion"...
Patents are only there to prevent the sort of "clandestine creativity" that surrounds an expensive project that is faced with the very real threat that it will be stolen right out from under the inventors. Look at China for a very real example of why a working (if less than ideal) patent system is better than no patent system: the only reward for creativity is obtained through going to market faster than your competitors, who will undoubtedly "borrow" your creations for their very next product cycle. This leads to one hastily released, poorly developed product after another, with no time spent on refining and perfecting new technologies. Companies with long development cycles like Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and others would be completely unviable without a patent system. Love them or hate them, they have made the Western (and patent-friendly) world what it is today.
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
The illegal immigrants aren't taking anyone's job, because hardly anyone else here will do it. Their claim: take our jobs, please. It's hard work, and we're stealing nobody's job.
Only to those who don't know any better. I have family members in drywall, and several friends in the masonry business. Most of them are currently unemployed - not for lack of wanting to work, but for the fact that the companies that employed them went under due to not being able to competitively bid against companies using off the books/illegal labor. Other companies are literally bidding less than the break even cost of legit companies because they're paying their labor under the table for less than minimum wage.
In the construction industry as a whole, it's literally gotten to the point where if a company wants to play by the rules, they're as good as gone. This isn't about Americans not being willing to work hard. I know people who have been doing these jobs for 30+ years working hard for all their lives who now are simply not able to find any work. For the younger generation, it's not too bad. They still have some hope of trying to get on in a different industry that hasn't gone all to hell. The 50+ guys whose main skill is now worthless to an actual American though is SOL.
I work in IT too - I don't do a menial labor job, but having grown in in the sticks, I know a ton of people who don't/didn't have cushy office jobs. These people have busted their ass for a living, and now their jobs are being handed away to those working for illegally low wages (which are made possible by the fact that they're not paying income taxes - that nagging little thing that reduces the wages of legit workers by 30-40%) just to make the rich richer.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Sure, drug companies are going to have trouble marketing medi-pops, but if you are actually worried about the legal risks you would take by making your own, you have gone off the deep end.
But thats the whole point. I'm not worried about the legal risks of making my own, but the medical risks of DIY. Obviously aspirin coated in a buffering compound would be a dumb idea to grind and mix. And there are probably medications out there that oxidize so fast, or are insoluble outside of an acidic stomach acid solution that you shouldn't do this. Most liquids, I would guess, should be fine. But what about liq amoxicillin? Who knows? The whole point is the legal risks of drug companies marketing medi-pops is what causes the somewhat unknown medical risks of DIY medi-pops. Its worth worrying about if something this blindingly obvious can cause a problem.
Rather than a made up example of patenting the wheel, I provide a real world example of how the broken patent system results in a net loss to society. TrollFlame the "patent the wheel" guy, not me.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Here you can see a comparison with mouseover effect:
http://martin.ankerl.com/2009/01/22/beautiful-font-hinting-in-ubuntu-810/
Open Source Alternatives
Though you might think so, this is incorrect. In modern fonts far less information is sent by transmitting the bitmap than the font description and this is how all modern font rendering works including on X with XRender.
"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
Say Microsoft decided to enforce their double-click patent, how would you find a way around it?
Actually I believe MS copied the double click from Apple and its one button mouse, but I for one wish it HAD been patented. It's a dumb convention, IMO. What would be wrong with having one click highlight, and a second click not dependant on time execute? I mean, single click an icon the second time and nothing happens, why does the second click have to be 1/n long to do anything? The double click really frustrates new computer users, and it's completely unnecessary.
Now that nearly the whole world has gotten used to this stupid convention, it would be hard to change. Hell, when I first got on the internet I had a hard time with hyperlinks because I wanted to double click them.
Free Martian Whores!
Apple has a different philosophy comparted to how almost everyone else renders fonts on the screen. Apple wants it to be perfectly shaped, but that's not possible even on today's high-res screens (including the so-called 'retina' display on the iPhone 4), so not only do they anti-alias it, but they also use subpixel rendering, and they do it even where it doesn't make sense (like dead-center between scanlines). The result is not pleasing to me due to annoying, fuzzy artifacts on its fonts but it's pleasing to Mac and iOS fans.
The closest way I get this effect using Freetype is by re-building the freetype library with the patented subpixels enabled. Note that this is not enabled by default in Fedora (because subpixel rendering is also patented) but it is enabled in Ubuntu.
In ftoption.h, the option is:
#define FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING
Then, specify "Slight hinting" which will use the really amazing Freetype autohinter (not the bytecode hinter) in the Appearance...Fonts...Details section. The option in fonts.conf (if you use it) is "hintslight" like this:
<match target="font"><edit mode="assign" name="hintsyle"><const>hintslight</const></edit></match>
This causes Freetype to endeavor to display the fonts a close as the actual font's metrics will allow, disregarding hints. Unlike Mac and iOS it will still try to avoid doing things that don't make sense like placing a line in the dead center of the space between scanlines on smaller point sizes. Ever since Apple started antialiasing everything I thought of it as a cop-out to really solving the problem of displaying fonts on the screen. I still think Microsoft had the right idea with Cleartype: make it look crispy perfect on the screen even if it is not perfectly shaped. Apple is an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.
I, for one, would like the option of using Apple's font renderer, heck, even Microsoft's, on Fedora or Ubuntu. Or, for that matter, Adobe's Cooltype, or the one that Sun's Java VM used to use from before it went open-source.
Kriston
The real problem is that it cost so much to *challenge* a patent on any grounds, and that at the end of the day, a patent attorney/judge decides what "obvious" is. Just a standard "do I infringe" from a attorney can cost $20K, and unlike an engineers report, it can be completely wrong and its not the attorneys problem or fault.
Now add the fact the groups like MPEG-LA have 1000s of patents, even small costs become massive.
The current system is self serving. Its serving lawyers under the pretense of protecting inventors.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Yep. If she's 18, and you're 38, you're a hero. However, if she's 17, and you're 37, you're a pedophile. American society makes so much sense.
Having worked in a big corporation, try to do *anything* without the express approval of the legal department.
Laws are written in a way where we are told we can't understand them, and must seek "legal advice" at every turn. Unlike real professionals, there is nothing wrong --legally-- with bad legal advice or incompetence, you get to stay a lawyer. Just see how long an engineer stays an engineer when they get things wrong, like a bridge wasn't strong enough.
I have known too many lawyers. All they care about is "due process", which is legaleses (why does that word even exist) for "lots of billable hours".
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!