

FreeType posts patent warning 206
Anonymous Coward writes "According to the the FreeType web page, there have been some new concerns raised about Apple's patents on TrueType. I hope this doesn't affect the planned TrueType support in XF86 4. " It appears that they are still checking into the issue, but I'd really like TrueType support. A lot. Let's hope Apple responds nicely.
How about paying for a license? (Score:1)
Why should anyone pay for MacOS when the patented technology could just be reimplemented for free?
Trademarks, not patents. (Score:1)
What would be interesting to see is whether Apple takes the approach to patents that many companies do (IBM in particular) - that patenting is a source of licensing revenue rather than a means of denying entry into a given technological market, i.e. an 'open licensing' policy.
Open source patent infringements aren't really an issue in that case - no money made directly off of XFree86's licensing of the technology, no reason to pursue a patent license, and no -real- reason to pursue any other expensive infringement action.
I.
Re:Opensource (Score:1)
Public opinion simply _is_. The poster was correct to note that Apple's behavior in this instance will affect public opinion of Apple, period. Perhaps you don't like that; that would simply indicate that you're incapable of dealing with social interaction with your peers.
MJP
Re:How about paying for a license? (Score:1)
If you patent the snagglepuss method of making steel from iron ore, then there is nothing stopping someone else from inventing the droopy method instead. The inputs are the same, the outputs are the same, the method differs. If you use the snagglepuss method to produce copper from copper ore, then you have NOT infringed the patent. Similarly if you take the snagglepuss method and use this a a basis to make a variation to make steel, then you have NOT infringed. You especially see this in medical patents. When one new drug comes out with one particular way of acting, within a few years you'll find many 'clones' of the drug, with minor variation but all working using the same methodology.
In many fields, this is considered a good thing. I take salbutamol for asthma. It is a good drug for me, with few side effects. My sister takes terbutaline, a similar drug, but with slightly different side effects, as she had problems taking salbutamol. If drugs were treated in the way that you suggest, then no-one would be allowed to produce drugs which act the same as existing ones.
Software patents are bad, they slow down technology improvements, and in many cases fail the 'obviousness' or "prior knowledge" tests.
Re:What do you mean no TT for free? (Score:1)
I assume you're replying to a comment in this thread, not to the original article, given that the original article wasn't discussing free fonts, it was discussing patent encumbrance of font rasterizing software.
Because xfstt, being another TrueType rasterizer, would presumably be hit by the same patent.
Re:who cares? (Score:1)
...which would presumably be threatened by the same patent. (Could we please have no more "use xfstt instead" postings unless they contain a good reason why the patent won't affect xfstt?)
Really? (Score:1)
If so, it would be an excellent argument to overturn the patents.
Alternatively, I think some of the Metafont work may anticipate the TrueType patents. People don't give it very many props now, but it contains some pretty amazing technology, and is truly one of the pioneering Open Source projects.
But these kind of claims require documentation.
Re:TKJRTICTEFSDP (Score:1)
Slashdot is one word, not two. Perhaps you need instruction on how to properly assemble an acronym. Anon smackass.
Talisman
Moderate the previous comment upwards, please! (Score:1)
Apple Misses One Year Patent Deadline (Score:2)
IANAL, but I think that if a patent holder doesn't protect it's intellectual property, it loses the right to defend. If Freetype has been around for a long time, it could be argued that this is the case.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I can tell you that patents are a little bit different than trademarks, where the owner risks losing protection altogether by failing to enforce their mark. With a patent, so long as you obtain one within a year of first publishing, displaying, or selling your invention, you own the right to make others stop using or selling that invention for 20 years. If you choose not to enforce your patent for the first 10, and then go after people when your invention falls into widespread use, that's your prerogative.
In Apple's case, it looks like they missed the one year deadline. They published the TrueType specification and software using it circa 1990, but didn't file for their patents until 2 years later.
Creative expression not always copyrightable (Score:2)
Of course, if you scan in a font, trace the outline and save it as a new font, you're creating a different program, and hence no copyright infringement has occurred (except in the case where the traced outline happens to be identical to the original, right down to the last hint -- but the chances of that happening are so small as to be negligible).
Re:TrueType Renderer Without the Fonts (Score:1)
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
That's exactly what happened with the telephone. And because of it, Alexander Graham Bell made a fortune, and 'that other guy' (I can never remember his name) lapsed into obscurity.
Patents don't cause trouble just in the software world. They're a two-edged sword.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:How about paying for a license? (Score:1)
Is a good idea limited to one person?
Re:Laserwriter II - January 1988 (Score:1)
Opensource (Score:1)
This would also boost their popularity a bit if they did do such a thing.
--
Life is short, Play hard.... ow.. stich in my side! stich in my side!
Re:Laserwriter II - January 1988 (Score:1)
Even though we were a Mac based print shop, we discouraged the use of True Type. It's fine for laser printers but it starts to exhibit jaggies at high resolutions (imagesetters running at > 2000 dpi). Type 1 fonts don't do this.
Stifled Laws (Score:1)
For example, someone mentioned to me that Corel, when in need of fonts, simply wrote a font-copier, and created a whole new set of fonts with different names.
Great irony would exist if we could have all the fonts in the world, but have to pay money to look at them. Apple walks a tightrope with this one, and they know it.
In reality, they cannot truely block the usage of truetype fonts, or block the software necessary for using it. One can post source code, and indicate that it's usage may be illegal in any particular country; Apple condemning such code's existence would simply put it into the outreaches of the law.
They are, in effect, powerless to really do anything against those who really want truetype fonts. But for those who are not willing to go around the world searching for a TT renderer, Apple could detriment it's usage in, for example, XFree86 4.
The best Apple can do is destroy the mainstream distribution. But the possibility does not exist that they can even dent the background distribution of covert software, in my humble but correct opinion. Those that will pay for Apple's restrictions, should they be placed on Truetype, would be the users just starting with Linux.
It is also a concern as to how Corel will play a part in this, being a font giant itself, and self proclaimed Linux advocate.
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
Yeah.. you missed it ;>
Re:Red Hat 6.0 xfs & TrueType... but how? (Score:1)
Well... how? :-)
Where should I copy the ttf-fonts?
Anything else?
Arg! (Score:1)
Perhaps it is time to ask SGI to be so kind as to donate their vector based graphical technology and help Linux encorperate it and make it standard. Then we really wouldn't have to worry too much about fonts and scalability. Vector based fonts are much nicer than TrueType fonts.
Until then lets hope Apple decides to play well with others.
Re:TT Patent (Score:1)
Let's hope Apple puts their money where their mouth is WRT OSS and licenses the technology gratis to Freetype, xfstt, etc.
Re:Stifled Laws (Score:1)
Apple has (c) on TrueType??! (Score:1)
--
Paranoid
Software Patents (rant) (Score:1)
Software patents offer us nothing! Software patents put us at constant risk! They are vile, evil, etc.
Now a good case could be made that certain carefully selected pieces of code actually deserve a software patent. Unfortunately, those pieces are so swallowed in a vast sea of trivially obvious tricks or prior art that it becomes nearly impossible to select them. And one is at nearly as much risk (or, sometimes, even more) over invalid patents as over valid ones: What percentage of developers can afford to defend in court against a claimed infringement?
WRT this particular case: I haven't studied whether or not Apple should be granted a patent on the TrueType code. It is enough that they have one, and I couldn't defend myself against them. The strong right arm carries the day.
I find this to be a clear witness to our current judicial system's origin in the midieval Trial By Combat (of selected champions).
Re:Not irony, just misunderstanding of IP law. (Score:1)
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
Patents are not secrets. If I patent a process to make widgets, the information on my process is publically available.
Why steal the concept of making steel 20 times faster than before from software that handles the process, when I can get the information on the process from the patent filing itself?!?!?!
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
Re:Creative expression not always copyrightable (Score:1)
I.
This may be irrelevant (Score:1)
This has the added benefit that "hinting" bitmaps can is easy to distribute between a lot of developers on the internet
The second means that you can keep your font server in some patent-free zone and use just the result of using the patent - afaik the patent protection does not extend to products that are manufactured using patented technologies.
Evidence or patent #'s please. (Score:1)
This is the second time this has been claimed, but nobody has provided the relevant patent numbers or provided any evidence. Could we have them, please?
I.
Re:YARTCESP (Score:2)
Apple = Gates Behind (Score:1)
Don't mean to be pessimistic, but....
How many times do I have to tell you? (Score:2)
Here's how I did it:
xfsft -port 7100 -config /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt/xfsft.conf
sleep 1 # Give xfsft a chance to start up
xset +fp tcp/127.0.0.1:7100
xset fp rehash
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
How does this relate to xfs? (Score:1)
Does anyone know where the documentation on using True Type fonts with Mandrake is? Or should I just uninstall xfs and follow the directions above for installing xfsft?
Re:Moderate the previous comment upwards, please! (Score:1)
dear A.C.: (Score:1)
That isn't my reason for switching to Linux.
Re:Creative expression not always copyrightable (Score:1)
So in Europe, as far as I know, both a font's design and its code can be protected by copyright.
Re:who cares? (Score:1)
Re:Red Hat 6.0 xfs & TrueType... but how? (Score:1)
FreeType does a great job -- you can see it's excellent anti-alaising work in the e.theme Hand of God.
For full documentation see the FreeType documentation.
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
That's the ISSUE date, not the file date. (Score:2)
The date of filing was May 9, 1989. They published the specification (according to your information) in 1990, about three years later.
I.
Metafont (Score:2)
What will they rethink of next?
Laserwriter II - January 1988 (Score:1)
Dang! (Score:1)
xfsft -port 7100 -config /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt/xfsft.conf &
Without that ampersand, X would never get past that line to the rest of the script.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Laserwriter II Series had TrueType in January 1988 (Score:1)
Re:TrueType Renderer Without the Fonts (Score:1)
Re:How many times do I have to tell you? (Score:1)
Re:Apple = Gates Behind (Score:1)
And before you even consider their $150 million investment - it's non-voting stock.
Re:Dang! (Score:1)
Re:hmm! (Score:1)
Re:elaborate?? (Score:1)
Whether that it means that all of these various patent claims are invalidated by prior art? IANAL! (Also, I've never actually read the book.)
Re:Solution? (Score:1)
The biggest problems with desktop postscript (tm), is it can be sluggish on some machines, and that free postscript fonts are rarer then plain old TrueType fonts that everyone uses and that finally many postscript fonts and/or desktop postscript have all kinds of legal issues involved.
But at any rate, the last time I checked, the GIMP 1.1.x has excellent support for anti-aliased postscript fonts, as does xpdf, KDE postscript viewer app and gv. More apps are on there way, I am sure....
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
Re:Solution? (Score:1)
Personally, my choice would be to define a character in a font as a catenation of bezier (sp?) curves. There should be lots of curve drawing code available, and catenation isn't hard: Just define the top of letter to bottom of letter as one unit (or 1000 or 1023 or ?? [if you don't want to deal with floats]) set hScale = vScale, define the bounding box, define the centers of each curve, etc.
But there's lots of detail work. Creating each good looking font is loads of work. Defining an API that existing programs can use is a bear. etc.
Re:hmm! (Score:1)
a) two camps with immutable and opposing opinions battling each other on an issue, or
b) (today at least) pointless content-free cascades.
Re:This may be irrelevant (Score:1)
John
Re:elaborate?? (Score:1)
At a guess, then you mean ~1979 (based on MetaFont being MF78), and the publisher was probably Addison-Wesley (I think that they did the TeXbook and a few other of Knuth's books).
What I was asking about was concrete points to contest the patent on -- "A bit is from this bit of software, a bit from that, and a few thingies here and there, and sorta this, and that, and it is a nice day today" doesn't really stand up in court
John
Other Advantages to using Font Server (Score:2)
Another advantage to using a font server is that it keeps the X server from coming to a griding halt when it needs to render a font with many glyphs. Ever click on one of those eastern fonts with a zillion different characters in it?
Even small fonts take a while to render on a 386 or 486 X terminal, so the concurrency provided by a separate font server is highly desirable there.
Solution? (Score:1)
Of course, we're all jumping to conclusions here and maybe, just maybe, Apple will give FreeType their blessing. It seems to me that Apple would benefit the most just by requiring a small notice to be displayed whenever the FreeType engine is used. It would be healthy for the religious movement they have built.
xfstt (Score:1)
Re:Opensource (Score:1)
TT Patent (Score:3)
note. I was informed of this patent a few weeks
ago but hadn't had a chance to really look at
it beyond a quick glance.
Suposedly it only covers "hinting". Someone
had said to me that prior art almost definitly exists (going back to the egyptions and the
ancient greeks no less).
It was also pointed out that Apple has never
pressed this issue with anyone. I have been to
busy lately to figure out how/if to respond to
this problem.
As it is now I plan to release xfstt 1.0 within
a few days (no major changes since the last one..
just a few minor fixes and updates that make
things a bit more polished).
If Apple isn't enforcing the patent...then might
as well let sleeping dogs lie. At worst it can
be moved to servers and maintainership outside
of the non-free world.
Open mouth, insert foot. (Score:1)
elaborate?? (Score:1)
John
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
Coca-Cola keeps their formula secret. It's a "trade secret". They do *not* have a patent on it. You can't have both patent and trade-secret protection for the same intellectual property.
Transmeta may have some patents. Those patents may be part of a *larger* thing that we don't know about, but the entirety of the processes that're covered by those patents are disclosed fully.
SGI's Fonts (Score:2)
SGI's fonts are a major reason I still use a 1994 Indigo2 running Irix instead of Linux as my workstation. I find it much more comfortable to read stuff.
D
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Re:TT Patent (Score:2)
> said to me that prior art almost definitly
> exists (going back to the egyptions and the
> ancient greeks no less).
AFAIK, "hinting" determines what the fonts looks like at different sizes. TrueType font Foo at 12 point may have its serifs positioned a bit differently than the same font at 5 point, for reasons relateded both to aesthetics and readability. I don't think whatever the Greeks and Egyptians did could be considered prior art.
I'd suggest keeping a sharp eye on patent issues. I would not put any trust in a company's laxity in enforcing a patent. A change in leadership could change a company from benign to litigious. If Apple really wants to come down on you and put you in the poorhouse, they probably can. It would be irrational and potentially bad PR for them to do so, certainly, but human beings in general are not always rational and they don't always act in their own best interests. I would not put too much stock in anyone's forbearance.
Re:Solution? (Score:1)
Simple character outlines are only part of the problem.
You need to be able to handle kerning of letters, substituting ligatures for 'fi', 'ffi', etc. and do all this in a language neutral way (so that the system will work for Arabic and Hebrew).
There was an interesting piece by somebody on the merits of OpenType vs QuickdrawGX on things like this...
John
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
First off, the concept of "peer review" comes from the academic sphere, where it is new ideas that are reviewed, not tarballs. Furthermore, the "peers" in the academic sphere are qualified and credentialed people. Not just a random ad-hoc meritocracy made up of the people who live online.
Second, there is a lot of good code out there which is only distributed in binary form, which is very well produced, and doesn't need to beg it's userbase to fix it.
You can have your little guilds of programmers if you like, and read each other's code with gusto, if that's what you enjoy doing. That doesn't mean you can crawl around in everybody else's code, nor does it mean your code is automatically better than theirs.
This is not an 'astroturfer' sentiment. It's the way a whole lot of code is written, distributed, and used. Not just code from Microsoft.
From http://www.microsoft.com/truetype/history/his (Score:1)
http://www.microsoft.com/true type/history/history.htm [microsoft.com]
A brief history of TrueType
The TrueType digital font format was originally designed by Apple Computer, Inc. It was a means of avoiding per-font royalty payments to the owners of other font technologies, and a solution to some of the technical limitations of Adobe's Type 1 format. Originally code named "Bass" (because these were scalable fonts and you can scale a fish), and later "Royal", the TrueType format was designed to be efficient in storage and processing, and extensible. It was also built to allow the use of hinting approaches already in use in the font industry as well as the development of new hinting techniques, enabling the easy conversion of already existing fonts to the TrueType format. This degree of flexibility in TrueType's implementation of hinting makes it extremely powerful when designing characters for display on the screen. Microsoft had also been looking for an outline format to solve similar problems, and Apple agreed to license TrueType to Microsoft. Apple included full TrueType support in its Macintosh operating system, System 7, in May 1990. Its more recent development efforts include TrueType GX, which extends the TrueType format as part of the new graphics architecture QuickDraw GX for the MacOS. TrueType GX includes some Apple-only extensions to the font format, supporting Style Variations and the Line Layout Manager. Microsoft first included TrueType in Windows 3.1, in April 1991. Soon afterwards, Microsoft began rewriting the TrueType rasterizer to improve its efficiency and performance and remove some bugs (while maintaining compatibility with the earlier version). The new TrueType rasterizer, version 1.5, first shipped in Windows NT 3.1. There have since been some minor revisions, and the version in Windows 95 and NT 3.51 is version 1.66. The new capabilities include enhanced features such as font smoothing (or more technically, grayscale rasterization). Microsoft's ongoing development effort includes the TrueType Open specification. TrueType Open will work on any Microsoft platform and Apple Macintosh machine, and includes features to allow multi-lingual typesetting and fine typographic control.
Re:How does this relate to xfs? (Score:1)
init.d/xfs is just a script, which starts the actual server. The server binary itself is typically /usr/X11R6/bin/xfsft. Make sure it's present. If you're running the script with "restart", make sure xfsft is actually running (ps waux | grep xfsft). If not, use /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs start for initialization.
Assuming that's ok, possible problems are:
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Re:This has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with Crapple (Score:1)
Re:SGI's Fonts (Score:2)
Even when it's not crashing, it's slow as molasses. Perhaps it will like me better when I upgrade to a R10000 one of these days.
D
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The history of TrueType (for those who care) (Score:1)
http://www.mackido.com/History/History_TT.html
Read up here, especially for those of you who believe Microsoft invented TT. Basically, it was Apple's response to Adobe's Postscript, which Adobe wasn't letting Apple develop for their own technology. TT became the foundation for QuickDraw GX. MS had indeed made something called TrueImage, but it died of uselessness, and they licensed TT from Apple.
M$, to their credit, now acknowledge Apple created TrueType:. htm
...which apparently when David Every wrote the TT article on MacKiDo, they didn't. There's also the MS standard "ClearType"a ult.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/truetype/history/history
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/def
which was released last year at Comdex. I haven't heard about it since.
J.
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
> no-patents != communism
in support of this - lot (maybe all) of the 'real-world' communist countries (USSR, rest of east-european countries) had patent laws, not very different from patent law in capitalist countries.
erik
Trade Secrets vs. Patents (Score:1)
Exactly! This is why industrial processes are often covered by trade secret, not by patent. The whole point of patents is to encourage the making public of innovations, with the time-limited monopoly on the idea granted as the reward for making public something which a person (or corp) could have kept secret as long as feasible. (Whether the current US patent system actually serves that purpose today is a different question ...)
I know of at least one instance of a patentable industrial process that was held as trade secret instead. The reasoning? To patent it would allow my competitors to use this idea. They could violate the patent and I would never know. I don't intend to sell this idea, I just plan to use it to make my real product more efficiently. Therefore, there is no benefit and probable harm to my business by pursuing a patent.
This same company, however, seems to be aggressive about obtaining patents on improvents to their manufactured end product themselves. In that case, if they incorporate an innovation into their product without securing patent protection, all their competitors would have to do is to duplicate the innovation without incurring the research costs and risks themselves. So patents make sense in those cases.
Re:xfstt (Score:1)
the current maintainer I can only take credit
for a few of the newer features...mere hacks
compared to a complete rendering engine that
was written from scratch by the original author.
However we do need to hope that Apple doesn't
decide to use their patent...defending it
could mean costly legal battles for some of us.
Bullshit. (Score:1)
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
Re: What about "ClearType" (Score:1)
Re:Arg! (Score:2)
Heh.. Yesterday I said something about how the IBM/G3 Linux systems might not cetch on, and several people replyed "Yea, but Apple will help get GCC up to speed, GCC is better than thier compiler." Well... I doubt it.
Apple's support of GNU has always been more hype IMHO than fact. They like to say they do to gain market share, but when it comes down to it, they seem to need to be forced to do anything. If people are going to hope it will happen, they will probably be SOL.
Think about it. IBM lets out motherboard specs for Motorola processors, hoping Linux will be used on them. What would Apple gain by getting GCC to work better with the G3? They wouldn't have people buying thier hardware, because it would be avaliable cheaper else where. They wouldn't have people buying thier OS, because if they developed GCC for the hardware, Linux would be stronger on the hardware. What's left? Well, maybe the "polish" like fonts, GUI stuff... Oh, hey, maybe Apple will let out thier font technology too, so no one has a reason to buy anything from them!
Heh.. I don't see it happening.
Re:Apple has (c) on TrueType??! (Score:1)
Apple and Microsoft cross-licensed technology. MS got TrueType. Apple got something that was (surprise) useless. Or at least never used.
Lapse of patent? (Score:1)
Two flies in the ointment; I can't remember if this is in relation to trademarks or patents; I could, however, imagine similar laws applying to the two. Secondly, to fight Apple in the courts would require a fair bit of money which I would imagine the Freetype authors don't have (they certainly couldn't afford legal advice on the patents, according to the web page).
In any case, I hope Apple allows the continued use of truetype fonts for no charge. *crosses fingers*
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Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
This example would never happen, but it does happen often with software. FreeType is faster and less bloated than the TrueType support developed by Apple and MS. This is the problem with software patents - better software can be suppressed because someone thought of it first. It's not the idea that counts, its the implementation.
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
Doesn't look that way to me (Score:1)
So I'll be skeptical of this claim unless I see some hard evidence.
Re:Stifled Laws (Score:2)
Just to make it clear, binary font files still are copyrighted, only the 'design' can not. You can't legally cat YourFont.ttf > MyNewFont.ttf (of course you would need to change some metadata too.)
You can 'copy' someone elses fonts as long as your font drawings are original. For example, you can scan in text and then draw your own outlines around the pictures of the glyphs.
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Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
handles the process. If this is wrong, please clarify.
My response was, don't waste time figuring out the process from the software that handles it, just get the information on the process from the patent on it.
Patents are public information. Of course, implementing them without a license can get you in trouble, but you knew that already, right?
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Re:YARTCESP (Score:2)
Not necessarily, many companies keep their processes secret, IE Coca-Cola. Transmeta hold at least two patents, yet we still don't OFFICIALLY know what they are doing.
Re:Arg! (Score:1)
Apple don't have a PPC compiler.
AFAIK they use MrC which is the Motorola C compiler. Very Fast. Not OS
Motorola on the other hand could probably be
convinced to merge MrC with GCC. That would be nice.
Re:YARTCESP (Score:1)
I'll make the effort of chewing the statement for you so it will fit nicely in your spoon.
"Don't confuse hobbyist, price-free software (which is also good...) with software which seeks to benefit from peer"
Hobbyist price-free software implies binary-only. When people involved with free software say "price free", it's to differentiate it from what has been termed as "Open Source" by some. As we can see from the "(which is also good)" part, he's not saying that software without source is not good for anything.
"They often overlap, but there's no intrinsic reason why the one is a subset of the other."
This means that programming can be a completely profitless venture as either open source or binary only. Or it can involve profit either way.
Regarding peer review, the concept of also has a strong foothold in cryptographical circles, where what amounts to tarballs are often reviewed. Any closed algorithm tends to not get much regard. Since software in general relies on the same principles, I don't see how that's a stretch at all. If anything, the peer review is more necessary because there are more oppurtunities for bugs the larger the codebase gets. Regarding credentials, if you can come up with a way to crack an cipher, or find a bug in some source code, I don't think anyone is going to ask for your certifications or degree before listening to your input.
As before, this doesn't mean that any given piece of peer-reviewed code is *always* going to be better than any given piece of non-reviewed code. Peer reviewed way has demonstrated to uncover and get fixed shortcomings and bugs better than similar closed-source endeavors, though.
For instance, when testing standard system tools, GNU tools had a lower failure rate than any of the proprietary UNIX tools. Take a look at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/Dienst/UI/2.0/Describe/ncst rl.uwmadison/CS-TR-95-1268 [wisc.edu] for details.
To quote a bit of it:
"The failure rate of utilities on the commercial versions of UNIX that we tested . . . ranged from 15-43%." "The failure rate of the utilities on the freely-distributed Linux version of UNIX was second-lowest, at 9%." "The failure rate of the public GNU utilities was the lowest in our study, at only 7%.
Further, the number of coders producing what will be a publically-sold software package is *far* outnumbered by people doing custom in-house jobs. If you're using tools that are less prone to failure and allow you to combine them in new and useful ways, your chances of being asked to do more work and advancing your career tend to be better. :) In case you need this explained too, it means "you can feed your family working with and producing Free Software".
Re:What do you mean no TT for free? (Score:1)
4.3 Why another free ttf font server?
Xfstt was actually the first free truetype font server. It was written from scratch, the useful freetype library not being ready in early 1997.
Perhaps you're thinking of xfsft?
Re:YARTCESP (Score:2)
Because a patent protects not just the implementation, but the idea itself. If all you want to do is protect programmers from having their implementations copied, just give them copyright protections and they can keep their source closed. What software patents do is to set up a minefield for coders. Every time he comes up with a clever way of doing something, he must look it up at the patent office, and make sure that no one has thought of it before. If someone has, then he can be effectively blackmailed into either paying outrageous fees or rewriting major sections of his software. And if he doesn't catch the patent in time, then he will release his product, and can then be ruined by a lawsuit.
The basic problem is that "inventions" in the computer field are different from those in other fields. Algorithms get rediscovered and reimplemented dozens of times by different programmers working independently. We get paid to "invent" better ways of getting a given task done. And while an inventor in another field might become rich off a single invention, programmers discover dozens of new algorithms in the course of a given project. Therefore it simply is not reasonable to give out patents to such "discoveries."
This is compounded by the lack of technical knowledge in the patent office. Most patent officials don't have a clue about our industry. Thus a clever lawyer can get a patent for a technique that any competent CS grad could tell you was common knowledge for years. That no one wrote about the technique is often simpy a result of the fact that it seemed too trivial to bother documenting. Yet if you know little about how programming works, it might seem to you that it is a new discovery. Thus unscrupulous folks can obtain patents for things that a talented high school student could dream up in an afternoon.
That's why many programmers oppose software patents. Copyrights are sufficient to pretect against piracy. Patents simply make life miserable for coders, with no real benefits.
Oops (Score:2)
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TrueType Renderer Without the Fonts (Score:2)
Good TrueType fonts are typically manually hinted. Also, each style of the font such as italic, bold, and bold italic are individual fonts instead of having the font renderer try to fake it.
This results in a much cleaner, crisper font than what you get from using one of the many font creation programs out there.
Unfortunately, the skill involved in creating manually hinted fonts doesn't come cheap and while individual fonts can't be patented, they can be copywrited.
Microsoft has been somewhat generous and made a few commonly used typefaces available for limited distribution at no cost. I believe these include Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana and Courier, which is really all you need 99% of the time.
The exception being menus and what not, these typically use a font specially created for small labels. I believe MS uses MS Sans Serif for this.
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