Freetype Lands In... Microsoft Office? 212
phy_si_kal writes "Now Microsoft must love free software. Indeed, Office 2011 for Mac (beta 5 at least) uses Freetype! Somehow they figured out the free software 'clean room implementation' of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs."
Must burn. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would it burn them up? There is no financial justification for porting Cleartype when they can just use for Freetype for their Mac version. If they were switching the Windows version to Freetype that would actually be a story.
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They're obviously using the Mac as their testbed - notice its also in a beta.
If its a success on the Mac, it'll make its way to Windows soon enough.
They wouldn't want to test it on Windows - if its a massive failure it'll hurt the Windows image... But not on a Mac!
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If its a success on the Mac, it'll make its way to Windows soon enough.
And you make this claim based on what evidence? Oh wait, none.
They wouldn't want to test it on Windows - if its a massive failure it'll hurt the Windows image... But not on a Mac!
Well of course. The Mac ports have pretty much always been a second-class citizen to the Windows version.
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And you make this claim based on what evidence?
The same purely speculative one you make your "financial justification" claim. I mean why would they bother developing ClearType if there was a cheap alternative to use? What evidence do you have that implementing Freetype is any easier than implementing Cleartype in a Windows Application on a Mac Environment?
Re:Must burn. (Score:4, Informative)
Well of course. The Mac ports have pretty much always been a second-class citizen to the Windows version.
Only recently. Excel originated on the Mac - 1.0 was Mac-only in 1985.
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Given that the context is desktop software, you have a very strange idea for the term "recent".
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Mac ports have been second class citizens for no less than 15 years. In computing terms, 15 years is not "recently."
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I know, I wasn't measuring from 1985. I was measuring from when Windows 95 came out.
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Hey, some of us try to live every day as if it were still 1985.
Re:Must burn. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Mac office team is small, light, and fast. There was a time in the XP days when Office on the Mac was considered better than Office on Windows. It gets certain features later than the windows version, if ever. But the core feels faster, more responsive, and less buggy. I'd take Office on the Mac any day over Office on Windows.
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Insightful)
are you sure?
it certainly used to be built by a Mac group within MS. I have heard stories of the crazy corporate environment that surrounded them...
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Informative)
It's done in a Mac Business Unit separate from the Office team.
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Not any more. During the big E&D shakeup earlier this year (during which Robbie Bach, the leader of E&D, left the company), the MacBU was moved into the greater Office group [macnn.com].
They do, however, continue to operate as a separate and semi-autonomous group therein.
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Helps make the financial results for Entertainment and Devices look better. Remember that they lost truely vast sums of money on the XBox and XBox 360...
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OK, seperate from the Office-team. I stand corrected.
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You're probably right that Office for Mac isn't a test-bed for technology to use in the Windows version, and you are correct that its developers aren't part of the Office-for-Windows development team. But the Mac Business Unit is hardly an "external organization". I'm not sure where it is in the corporate hierarchy this year, but it's headquartered at their Redmond campus, where yes: they get funny looks as they carry their MacBooks around. By the way, Excel was not ported to the Mac; it went the other w
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were switching the Windows version to Freetype that would actually be a story.
Good point. I was presuming there already was a Mac version of TrueType. If there isn't one already, you are absolutely right.
TrueType in Mac OS 7 (Score:4, Informative)
TrueType has been in Mac OS since System 6 (as a kernel extension) and System 7 (standard). In Mac OS classic, as in Windows, the rendering engine uses a "hint" to fit the outlines to the pixel grid. These hints are stored as a bytecode program in the font that modifies the outline; the patent covers this use of bytecode. (FreeType can be configured to use these hints or, especially in jurisdictions with software patents, to create its own hints purely from the outline shapes.)
Microsoft's ClearType rendering engine stretches the outlines horizontally by a factor of 9 before applying hints, which messes up fonts that don't expect this *cough*Helvetica 14px "mnr"*cough*. But because Mac OS X uses antialiasing for all text, it ignores most hints. Perhaps Microsoft wants to make the appearance of text the same across all platforms.
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I guess the Apple guys just got dissed on by the Microsoft guys then... but that's certainly not news.
Blame Adobe, seriously (Score:2)
MS and Apple hit the panic button when they have seen relying on Adobe postscript technology to display text may have serious consequences.
Adobe validated the panic by asking for ridiculous amount of money. They also managed to drive SJobs and Apple nuts, yes both. Rest is Truetype :)
http://truetype-typography.com/tthist.htm [truetype-typography.com]
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*cough*Helvetica 14px "mnr"*cough*
Ok, I'm going to get modded down, but could we stop with the "cough cough" thing? Just say, "like Helvetica 14px." Like a normal human being writing a normal forum post. The "cough cough* thing, assuming it was ever funny, hasn't been funny in years. Now it does nothing but make your post harder to read, and make me think you have no actual sense of humor.
That said, good, informative, post.
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Cleartype fonts in Freetype, like the new fonts that appeared with Windows Vista, look nothing like they do in Windows. I have treid every configuration of Freetype using any combination of bytecode, slight/medium/strong autohinter, the "unpatented" subpixel renderer, and antialias. Try it yourself. You'll need an understanding of the Fontconfig library to try it out.
Have you tried applying hint transformations only to the Y coordinate? That'd simulate what GDI ClearType does, which (as I recall) involves hinting the outlines for 864x96 dpi (a factor of 9 across), rendering as monochrome, convolving the result horizontally with a 9-tap box filter, decimating by 3 horizontally, and finally drawing that with subpixels.
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Informative)
TrueType is a font standard, which has largely been succeeded by OpenType. TrueType was developed by Apple and licensed by Microsoft, while OpenType was co-developed by Adobe and Microsoft.
On Windows, Microsoft has two text APIs: Uniscribe & GDI, which combine to provide text rendering and a whole lot more, and DirectWrite, which is new to Windows 7 and has much better quality, improved OpenType support, and GPU acceleration. These technologies are so baked into Windows that I'm not surprised at all that they wouldn't want to port them to OS X.
Re:Must burn. (Score:4, Informative)
If they were switching the Windows version to Freetype that would actually be a story.
Good point. I was presuming there already was a Mac version of TrueType. If there isn't one already, you are absolutely right.
Oh, there's definitely a Mac version of TrueType. Apple developed it 20 years ago [wikipedia.org] to compete with Adobe Type 1 [wikipedia.org] and licensed TrueType to Microsoft for Windows 3.1. It forced John Warnock to open Type 1 and eventually killed Adobe Type Manager [wikipedia.org]. Remember when ATM was something other than a place to get cash or something dirty?
Add To That (Re:Must burn.) (Score:2)
The focus on "web inter-op" and publishing. If they are striving for "looks the same on PC, Mac and on the web", their chances are better if they start using a font typeset that is freely distributable to those platforms.
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The focus on "web inter-op" and publishing. If they are striving for "looks the same on PC, Mac and on the web", their chances are better if they start using a font typeset that is freely distributable to those platforms.
If that's the motivation and MS starts pushing back on some of its other in house technologies substituting OSS versions... if I had been an MS developer writing the original versions I might read that as a vote of "no confidence" from my own managers. That would prompt me to look for other work because what I was doing at MS would not be valuable to either MS or the industry as a whole.
But, I don't work at Microsoft. And other posters have pointed out this may not be at all what is happening in this case.
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What I find odd is that they don't just use ATSUI – apple's built in true type font rendering, which is rather better than both freetype and cleartype.
ATSUI is not for Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find odd is that they don't just use ATSUI – apple's built in true type font rendering, which is rather better than both freetype and cleartype.
ATSUI and the Core Text that replaced it in Tiger are Mac-exclusive. If Microsoft used it for Office, it wouldn't be able to ensure consistent document appearance between Mac and Windows versions of Office.
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ATSUI is more akin to Pango than FreeType; Microsoft probably has their own Pango-like functionality in Office.
Last I looked, the Mac platform was technically significantly behind Pango in rendering complex scripts.
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So you're saying there is no financial justification for using Microsoft software when you can just use free software because it's just as good? Gee, I would think Microsoft would be wide open to that rationale.
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Interesting)
A more interesting question to ask is what portions of Freetype are they using and to what purpose. Rendering? Why not use Apple's native rendering engine? People have argued for years over the advantages and disadvantages of Apple's rendering tech relative to MS. MS has traditionally favored visual sharpness at the cost of precise positioning of the characters relative to each other. The cost of that is that at a detailed level, what you see on the screen may not accurately reflect what will be printed. Apple has gone the other way. The characters may look a bit fuzzier, but the positions are proper (again, at a very detailed level) relative to where they should be.
At least for some Windows applications over the years, the position inaccuracies have caused trouble when it comes to printing. Some word processing programs will (infrequently) get different line-filling results depending on whether they are writing to the display or to a printer. In the worst case, this causes a paragraph to be either one line longer or shorter in the printed document. Depending on how the app handles image placement, the results can be... interesting, as stuff gets pushed onto different pages in different ways.
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I suppose it depends on your motivations. Do you do what you do because of hate or because you have a passion about something? Or maybe you're somewhere in between and decide to make the most practical choice.
Re:Must burn. (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia: "TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems."
There was a story on Slashdot back in July talking about FreeType celebrating the expiration of the Apple's TrueType patent.
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From Wikipedia: "TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems."
There was a story on Slashdot back in July talking about FreeType celebrating the expiration of the Apple's TrueType patent.
Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.
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Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.
The Apple software team that just had to put out iOS 4.0.2 to fix the FreeType security hole [apple.com] that allowed people to jailbreak their phones (or get hacked by a more evil website with a malicious PDF)? If it's good enough for the company that originally developed TrueType and held the key patents, why not use FreeType?
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Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.
The Apple software team that just had to put out iOS 4.0.2 to fix the FreeType security hole [apple.com] that allowed people to jailbreak their phones (or get hacked by a more evil website with a malicious PDF)? If it's good enough for the company that originally developed TrueType and held the key patents, why not use FreeType?
I'm not saying they shouldn't.
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I thought Apple invented TrueType, but maybe I'm trapped in the reality distortion field.
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Zarf wrote:
Apple did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType [wikipedia.org]
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Ironically Apple invented Truetype [wikipedia.org] ;).
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Apple's never been the best of friends with Microsoft in the first place. No big deal.
Don't be tricked by PR (Score:2)
Apple and Microsoft doesn't "hate" eachother or they don't conspire eachother. I bet MACBU (at MS) is one of the most privileged Developer teams on Apple's OS X Development, I mean for bug reports, help etc.
MS Office is always and always on top 10 of Amazon's best selling software. Even more interesting, in current (dynamic) list, Mac version is just 1 place below Win32 version.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software [amazon.com]
I bet not using ATSUI has something to do with Apple's "font display philosophy" and "
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According to Wikipedia, Apple wrote TrueType.
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That's odd, I would be kind of embarrassed of the flattery that the largest behemoth of a software company finds your code good enough to use in what is arguably the most widely used and popular suite of office software.
But not for the version for the premier platform for the software. It's used in the second-class citizen port to the Mac. This is just a way for them to save time and money.
Re:How Do You Figure? (Score:5, Funny)
Mac users shouldn't even be allowed to be citizens.
Simply owning an Apple product is a clear statement that a person has no concern for their own rights or the future of mankind.
No better than uneducated slaves, keep them in their cages to protect the true thinkers from their short-sited views.
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Needs more +1 Funny. Are you going for the elusive +5 Flamebait?
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Glenn, is that you?
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Something that doesn't forbid you from installing apps only from a hand-picked list of crap officially blessed by the great Steve would be a good start.
You misread his comment. (Score:4, Insightful)
The OP was talking about the authors of TrueType, not FreeType.
Re:How Do You Figure? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the FreeType guys should be proud. The original Mac TrueType team should be a bit steamed. Presumably there was some Mac TrueType team that just had all their hard work tossed out. Another poster pointed out that there may not be a TrueType implementation in house at Microsoft that works on the Mac.
If there isn't a Microsoft TrueType for Mac team then no harm no foul.
Re:How Do You Figure? (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. Another way to write a flame baiting title for TFS here would be "Mac text rendering sucks so much that Microsoft uses Freetype instead" ~
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+1 inciteful
Overblown (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an overblown summary. Come back to us when they switch the version of Office for Windows to using Freetype over Cleartype. This is clearly nothing but a way to save money by leveraging Freetype that already runs on Macs instead of wasting time and money porting Cleartype.
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I agree that the summary is completely idiotic, especially since TrueType was patented by Apple, not Microsoft, as the summary claims, and the patents has since expired.
However, there is something interesting about it. MS could have used the native font rendering engine on OS X. They had at least three options: native renderer, freetype, or port cleartype. I am not surprised that chose not to port, but their choice seems to indicate that freetype does good enough job emulating cleartype rendering, better
Hold Me, I'm Scared (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe god does exist?
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Flying pigs spotted here too.
Pigs are the replacement for chairs once He leaves?
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Is Pink Floyd recording a new album?
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Using finite terms to describe infinity is contradictory.
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Mathematically yes.
But you can no more prove a set is finite by empirical test then you can prove that pie will not at some point start repeating numbers after calculating it out to a some point. It's good for engineering at the scales people exist but does math have any hope of describing the fundamental nature beyond what we can empirically prove by experiment. Probably not.
Besides, Science is about the Natural world. Not the Supernatural one (God). Confusing the two ends up making people mad.
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I'm confused about what this statement means at all. It is certainly and easily provable that pi is irrational and that all irrational numbers will never repeat their pattern. I think even the greeks knew at least one of those statements.
Similarly, it's possible to prove that any set is either finite or infinite...
Sorry, I'm just totally confused.
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Re:Hold Me, I'm Scared (Score:5, Interesting)
IIRC, FreeType with all the hinting turned on looks more like ClearType than Apple's renderer, and positioning is pixel perfect relative to ClearType - therefore, it's actually to make Mac Office look MORE like Windows Office, not less.
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You use words like "zealots" and yet you have not even bothered to minimally read up on what you are supposedly talking about... FreeType cannot be inferior to TrueType because the two are absolutely incomparable. What you said is more or less the same than saying that Apache is actually inferior to HTTP.
You do not even end up looking silly...
Am I missing something? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this anti-Microsoft? I think it is a good thing that Microsoft is using Freetype.
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Yeah, but only for the Mac version. This summary is trying to make it seem like Microsoft or the Office team is dumping Cleartype for Freetype which is not true.
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No, it's not.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes it is. The implication is quite clear in this sentence:
Somehow they figured out the free software "clean room implementation" of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs."
This is nothing but Microsoft saving time and money by using Freetype that is already ported to the Mac instead of doing the work to port Cleartype. This a non-story at best.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes it is. The implication is quite clear in this sentence:
Somehow they figured out the free software "clean room implementation" of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs."
This is nothing but Microsoft saving time and money by using Freetype that is already ported to the Mac instead of doing the work to port Cleartype. This a non-story at best.
You mean, it is like FreeType "suits better Microsoft's needs" when porting MS Office to OSX??
And they indeed dumped ClearType for Freetype for this OSX version; that is a true assertion. The fact that they decided to compile others code instead of use their own is exactly that.
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And this implies they're dumping Cleartype just how? I don't see it. The summary says specifically that it's about the OS X version.
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Microsoft and Apple marketing tell you that their proprietary software is supposedly superior, and Microsoft marketing tells you that using open source software contaminates your software. Obviously, if both Apple and Microsoft use FreeType for key products, in preference to software that they would only have to port, that shows that their marketing is lying. This may not be news to nerds, but it is certainly a good argument to use when negotiating the use of FOSS with management.
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No, because Office 2007 and 2010 on Windows use ClearType for font rendering. Even if you have it turned off at the OS level.
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Truetype is Apple's technology (Score:5, Informative)
Their ``Royal'' font format.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/truetypehistory.mspx [microsoft.com]
Microsoft got access to it by trading to Apple their ``TrueImage'' PostScript clone (seen that used anywhere lately?)
William
Re:Truetype is Apple's technology (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, MS got access to it the same way any Mac developer does - by linking to /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.dylib.
Seriously Slashdot, what's next - OMG Microsoft is using GCC to compile Office for Mac!
(Oh, the irony... the captcha for this post was "obvious")
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They included freetype (not linked) I think (Score:4, Informative)
If you link to that particular lib, you must be using X11. Don't link to anything X11 on OS X since it is strictly optional part of OS X install. I don't think MS would require X11 client to have their office to run.
Oh if MS woke up and adopted itself today, their "Office for UNIX" (I bet they would name linux/bsd one that way) would link to it. Of course, not a chance.
I agree to whoever you reply to, pretty ironic that Apple uses/licenses freetype too. I smiled when I saw the note on iPod touch license.
And while on it, their Mac Business unit blog is one of rare MS blogs to follow, for example they had to deal with much more strict gcc coming with XCode/Leopard while compiling MS Office. It is not a "big secret" or anything, OS X Office is truly a Mac program. I heard they experimented with the "actual MS Word on win32" port to Mac OS. Their customers went nuts. They got tricked by "Why doesn't MS Word for Mac doesn't have this?" feedback originally.
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They can, in matter of months (Score:2)
It is Microsoft's political/business choice not to ship a UNIX Office. They are clearly capable of doing it. Funny is, it could sell well, but you can only see from amazon top 10, like mac office which people keeps bitching but always on top 3.
Perhaps they could do some "cloud" fashion thing on Android but, would never ship a real thing on it.
That is the part of MS which needs to change.
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Maybe five years ago, it would still have made a difference. These days, the damage is done: Office alternatives are compatible enough, and people don't need to replicate Microsoft's idiosyncrasies precisely anymore because nobody expects them to work always (they don't even work consistently between Windows and Mac, or different Windows versions).
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Actually, MS got access to it the same way any Mac developer does - by linking to /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.dylib.
Wow! How did they manage to do that on a Windows machine back in 1989? I know MS programmers are beast, but linking to a library from a completely different operating system, especially a library that has not even been written yet, that's quite an achievement. They must have used some sort of magic, that's how they circumvented Apple's TrueType patents, too.
EEE (Score:3, Funny)
Patents expired (Score:5, Informative)
Go to www.truetype.org and read the section on patents.
"All patents related to the TrueType bytecode interpreter have expired since May 2010. More information regarding this topic is available at our patents page."
All patents were originally held by Apple up to May 2010.
Bail out. (Score:2, Interesting)
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Except it's not all of a sudden.
You may have missed the last few years of relevant stories.
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Freetype is under a BSD style license. If it was GPL, then the whole of MS Office for Mac would've to be GPL'ed in order to comply. I guess that's what he meant when he said that.
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Microsoft has been using open source software under the BSD license for many years (e.g., networking related software); they like the BSD license. So, open source has been "bailing them out" for years. They hate the GPL. Their marketing doesn't make such fine distinctions and they simply like to portray FOSS as inferior and dangerous in general. You see a similar disconnect with Apple, saying one thing to geeks, another to business types (Apple has to tread more lightly in that regard because they obvio
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Fail!
First, as freetype license is BSD, they are not stealing anything. They have complete right to use it.
Second, they don't do it to get better fonts. They are using a library that 1) emulate their own cleartype engine well enough for their purposes and 2) already exists on OS X. There is no indication anywhere that freetype is better than their own cleartype. It may be, and when we see them ditching cleartype and using freetype on Windows, we may conclude that it is, but until that happens, MS is sim
What actually happened (Score:2, Interesting)
"shall we port truetype to mac, or let the idiots have crappy looking fonts?", "hmmn, i cant really be arsed porting truetype to a crap operating system", "hey, guys, check this out, someone has already done the hard work, and its free source too. that means our product will look good, mac users wont feel left out and we can all look cool and get some free publicity by using free software"...
TrueType, OpenType, Type 1... (Score:2)