Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 10th Apr 2007 18:53 UTC
As reported by Slashdot, debate has risen over ClearType in Linux. OpenSUSE recently disabled this technology, saying "that this feature is covered by several Microsoft patents and should not be activated in any default build of the library". Other websites have picked up on this as well: "The strange thing is though: no matter the fact that Novell and Microsoft are now buddies, openSUSE still has to be concerned about the ClearType patents!"
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-11-05
I might be quite wrong, but my understanding is that OpenSuSE are saying that they inherited this from upstream: the freetype folks made the decision not to enable the switch and OpenSuSE have simply gone with it.
In which case, I'd say that a lot of the furore about this is baseless and the OSNews headline is on a par with "Bill Gates Ate My Anti-aliasing". The people who should be asked about this are, first, the freetype folks and only then the OpenSuSE ones.
Of course, this doesn't mitigate the fact that software patents are wrong, in the strong opinion of many, nor that Microsoft is a sucky company which likes to bully and cause trouble.
However, if the "community" (a word on whose meaning no two people seem able to agree) is looking for a reason to bash SuSE about the head, this is not it.
It's also worth asking whether this alleged omission makes any practical difference when using OpenSuSE 10.2. On my widescreen LCD the answer is no. In fact, to my eye OpenSuSE 10.2 has distinctly better anti-aliasing in terms of letter-forms than Debian Etch which I run on the same machine.