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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.
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!)
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.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Okay - consider this your correction.
While what you say is true in the theory of how patents should work - it is not how it is applied today. People abstract a lot of the methodology to claim that their idea IS the methodology.
You can patent anything you can get a patent clerk to sign off on. At which point the only recourse the public has is to take you to court. That's well beyond the resources of a project like FreeType. Just because the patent is technically invalid doesn't mean they can't make your life hell for infringing on it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
BTW, anti-aliasing is useful in 2 situations only: if you are rendering fonts in big sizes (bigger than 13px)
And guess what: LCD subpixel rendering stretches the font outline horizontally by a factor of three as its first step. So if you're rendering a font at 9px, it's as if you were rendering it at 27px across.
or if you have bad, non-hinted fonts (as Bitstream Vera)
Case in point: I had to switch a client's web site from Helvetica to Arial (sorry, smug typophile weenies) because Helvetica's hints handle this stretching poorly, causing the upper bowls of letters like m, n, and r to overshoot the x-height by a whole pixel. When FreeType's autohinter performs better than Microsoft ClearType with BCI on Helvetica, something is up.
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 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!