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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.
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.
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