So?

Posted Oct 3, 2009 11:57 UTC (Sat) by asherringham (guest, #33251)
In reply to: So? by drag
Parent article: Red Hat Asks Supreme Ct. to Exclude Software From Patentability (Groklaw)

"and for Linux software distros the threat is enough to keep them from having competitive features"

I'd be interested if you expanded on this and described what you mean. Are you saying that Linux distros would include things they are currently afraid to, because of software patents? What things do you have in mind?

So?

Posted Oct 3, 2009 12:37 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

if you think about things like video codecs you find a category where distros don't ship features that desktopusers want because of patents.

you may question how big a difference this makes, but there's no question that there is an impact

So?

Posted Oct 3, 2009 16:15 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes. Video codecs is a big one.

Another big one that is coming up is video drivers. OpenGL 3.0 includes several software patents. Support is required for full compatibility and OpenGL 3 is critical to being competitive with DirectX in the market place.

swpat.org pages

Posted Oct 4, 2009 5:07 UTC (Sun) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Help to document these problems would be welcome on swpat.org:

The text you are seeing on screen, for example...

Posted Oct 3, 2009 19:24 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

If you are using Linux then most distributions will not use hints emebedded in fonts to show them. Because of the Apple's and Microsoft's patents. If this is not the good example - I don't know what is.

The text you are seeing on screen, for example...

Posted Oct 4, 2009 9:16 UTC (Sun) by bawjaws (guest, #56952) [Link] (2 responses)

What I don't understand is why when i turn hinting *off* (though anti-aliasing on), not only do I
personally prefer the way it looks, I find it looks identical to the rendering in Mac OS X, a system
made by the holders of the relevant truetype patents.

Furthermore, the open source fonts are less likely to have these hint instructions in the first place.
So we're turning on patented code in order to use Microsoft's licensed fonts, when there are
metrically compatible free fonts available.

So are we falling into the trap of thinking "it's patented, therefore it must be better"? After all these
are 20 year-old patents. Type was rendered very differently in those days.

The text you are seeing on screen, for example...

Posted Oct 4, 2009 22:04 UTC (Sun) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] (1 responses)

Subpixel antialiasing, which is a technique used by Microsoft and Apple for crisper display of text on LCDs, is patented, and thus disabled by default in FreeType. So while the hinting for bitmap displays is less relevant with today's antialiasing, the highest quality antialiasing available is still patented and disabled in free software for that reason.

The text you are seeing on screen, for example...

Posted Oct 6, 2009 11:54 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

A minor nit: subpixel antialiasing isn't used for crisper display. The purpose of it is to attempt to give better shapes, which is at odds with crispness at the kind of resolutions that are used with current displays.

(Personally, I can't wait for displays to get to a few hundred DPI, at which point this subpixel business might finally go away. I can't stand the chromatic aliasing caused by even the best subpixel implementations, and people are using it as a crutch now to get away with producing poorer quality fonts.)