Apr 08 2007
00:47 GMT
00:47 GMT
Microsoft patents are striking again! political 
Funny thing, I noticed this because someone complained about encountering the side-effects of Microsoft patents on ClearType in... openSUSE 10.2!
James Ots noticed that Sub-pixel Antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2 seems to be broken, so he recompiled the package from sources, with sub-pixel antialiasing turned on.
Two comments pointed to an openSUSE ML message: [Bug 259718] Sub-pixel antialising does not work when set from KDE Control Center, which quoted comments from the sources to explain the reason and the WONTFIX decision:
First of all, the only patent that affected FreeType2 and was disabled by default in most of the distros was the bytecode interpreter (BCI), patented by Apple -- see this. The FreeType2 antialiasing and hinting features are more than one, but I am a conservative guy and, as explained in Autohinting, Hinting, Bytecode Interpreting: Freetype2 Clarifications, I only use:
Yep, no RGB subpixel hinting whatsoever -- and this is what the "ClearType-like" issue is all about. I could never stand the colored margins of everything that uses subpixel hinting, not in Linux, and certainly not in Windows, as far as I could see it (ClearType makes everything look much worse IMO). And BCI is unnecessary, I am very happy with my choices on both LCDs and CRTs.
The strange thing though: no matter Novell and Microsoft are now buddies, openSUSE still has to be concern about the ClearType patents! Unbelievable.
Let's see what Red Hat does when comes to FreeType2 and patent concerns, by looking in the freetype.spec defaults:
RHEL5 (freetype-2.2.1-16.el5.src.rpm) and FC6 (freetype-2.2.1-10.fc6.src.rpm) only take care to disable the Apple-patented BCI:
Fedora 7 however, just like openSUSE 10.2, also disables the Microsoft-patented subpixel hinting:
While it's not clear to me why Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5, recently released, still doesn't care about some Microsoft patents (usually, Red Hat is very cautious when comes to patents), it's also very curious that the patent covenant between Novell and Microsoft, which is supposed to cover openSUSE's possible patent infringements, is still ignored by the openSUSE team, even in cases where it could have been useful to them!
Beats me. What I can see here, in brief:
IMPORTANT UPDATE, 04/10: Courtesy of Max Spevack, I could get some relevant info concerning this issue. As it looks like, the subpixel hinting that is turned off by default now is a new feature in FreeType 2.3, and this explains why the building option to turn it off is only needed starting with Fedora 7, or openSUSE 10.2. The flag is also there so you could easily negate it and rebuild the package with the new, improved subpixel hinting on. Some more details on the patents in FreeType2, from David Turner of the FreeType project, here.
RE-UPDATE: There is an official reaction on Novell's PR blog: ClearType issue and openSUSE, by Bruce Lowry: «There's a slashdot posting up about Novell disabling a font type, ClearType, from the the openSUSE distribution in connection with possible Microsoft patent concerns. This seems to have created some confusion, in that a number of observers are wondering why, given Novell's patent agreement with Microsoft, this technology wouldn't be allowed in openSUSE. We’ve been clear from the beginning of this deal that the Microsoft agreement would not change our development processes in any way ... In this specific case, the ClearType font is supplied as part of the freetype2 package; last summer the upstream maintainer changed the package's default settings to disable Clear Type and thereby avoid possibly relevant Microsoft patents. So, consistent with Novell's preexisting practices and current policy, Novell is using the default settings established by the upstream maintainer. Distributions such as Fedora made the same choice. This issue only came up in the summer of 2006 and therefore older distributions are using the previous default (enabled ClearType). We hope this clears up any confusion over the issue.». Not quite. I mean, thanks for the consistency, but please, could you have somebody who knows what everything is about to rewrite the post? There isn't anything like a ClearType font, but a sub-pixel hinting algorithm for any displayed fonts!
37 (+0) comments so far [view/add comments] [permalink]
James Ots noticed that Sub-pixel Antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2 seems to be broken, so he recompiled the package from sources, with sub-pixel antialiasing turned on.
Two comments pointed to an openSUSE ML message: [Bug 259718] Sub-pixel antialising does not work when set from KDE Control Center, which quoted comments from the sources to explain the reason and the WONTFIX decision:
- Uncomment the line below if you want to activate sub-pixel rendering (a.k.a. LCD rendering, or ClearType) in this build of the library.
Note that this feature is covered by several Microsoft patents and should not be activated in any default build of the library.
First of all, the only patent that affected FreeType2 and was disabled by default in most of the distros was the bytecode interpreter (BCI), patented by Apple -- see this. The FreeType2 antialiasing and hinting features are more than one, but I am a conservative guy and, as explained in Autohinting, Hinting, Bytecode Interpreting: Freetype2 Clarifications, I only use:
- greyscale antialiasing (a.k.a. greyscale smoothing in GNOME)
- with full hinting.
Yep, no RGB subpixel hinting whatsoever -- and this is what the "ClearType-like" issue is all about. I could never stand the colored margins of everything that uses subpixel hinting, not in Linux, and certainly not in Windows, as far as I could see it (ClearType makes everything look much worse IMO). And BCI is unnecessary, I am very happy with my choices on both LCDs and CRTs.
The strange thing though: no matter Novell and Microsoft are now buddies, openSUSE still has to be concern about the ClearType patents! Unbelievable.
Let's see what Red Hat does when comes to FreeType2 and patent concerns, by looking in the freetype.spec defaults:
RHEL5 (freetype-2.2.1-16.el5.src.rpm) and FC6 (freetype-2.2.1-10.fc6.src.rpm) only take care to disable the Apple-patented BCI:# Disables patented bytecode interpreter. Setting to 0 enables
# the bytecode interpreter.
%define without_bytecode_interpreter 1
# the bytecode interpreter.
%define without_bytecode_interpreter 1
Fedora 7 however, just like openSUSE 10.2, also disables the Microsoft-patented subpixel hinting:# Disable patented bytecode interpreter and patented subpixel rendering.
# Setting to 0 enables them.
%define without_bytecode_interpreter 1
%define without_subpixel_rendering 1
# Setting to 0 enables them.
%define without_bytecode_interpreter 1
%define without_subpixel_rendering 1
While it's not clear to me why Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5, recently released, still doesn't care about some Microsoft patents (usually, Red Hat is very cautious when comes to patents), it's also very curious that the patent covenant between Novell and Microsoft, which is supposed to cover openSUSE's possible patent infringements, is still ignored by the openSUSE team, even in cases where it could have been useful to them!
Beats me. What I can see here, in brief:
- Microsoft patents are striking again. Somehow, they bothered to inform the OSS community that FreeType2 is infringing some very nice software patents.
- openSUSE guys are morons. Their American boss has signed with Microsoft a very nice agreement that confers them patent immunity with regards to Microsoft, yet they seem to be unaware of that. I can see now why they were defending the agreement: they're so stupid that they can't understand what the covenant was saying!
- With regards to software patents, America is the worst thing that could happen to the humanity. Hitler is dead, Stalin is dead, software patents are very much alive. Thank you, America!
IMPORTANT UPDATE, 04/10: Courtesy of Max Spevack, I could get some relevant info concerning this issue. As it looks like, the subpixel hinting that is turned off by default now is a new feature in FreeType 2.3, and this explains why the building option to turn it off is only needed starting with Fedora 7, or openSUSE 10.2. The flag is also there so you could easily negate it and rebuild the package with the new, improved subpixel hinting on. Some more details on the patents in FreeType2, from David Turner of the FreeType project, here.RE-UPDATE: There is an official reaction on Novell's PR blog: ClearType issue and openSUSE, by Bruce Lowry: «There's a slashdot posting up about Novell disabling a font type, ClearType, from the the openSUSE distribution in connection with possible Microsoft patent concerns. This seems to have created some confusion, in that a number of observers are wondering why, given Novell's patent agreement with Microsoft, this technology wouldn't be allowed in openSUSE. We’ve been clear from the beginning of this deal that the Microsoft agreement would not change our development processes in any way ... In this specific case, the ClearType font is supplied as part of the freetype2 package; last summer the upstream maintainer changed the package's default settings to disable Clear Type and thereby avoid possibly relevant Microsoft patents. So, consistent with Novell's preexisting practices and current policy, Novell is using the default settings established by the upstream maintainer. Distributions such as Fedora made the same choice. This issue only came up in the summer of 2006 and therefore older distributions are using the previous default (enabled ClearType). We hope this clears up any confusion over the issue.». Not quite. I mean, thanks for the consistency, but please, could you have somebody who knows what everything is about to rewrite the post? There isn't anything like a ClearType font, but a sub-pixel hinting algorithm for any displayed fonts!37 (+0) comments so far [view/add comments] [permalink]
