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Patents. I don't understand why the other distros believe they can enable it without patent problems.
For the same reasons they believe they can ship their distribution without problems.
Take a look at Novell and Red Hat, and what they're being sued for. If you start thinking about patents too much you should simply quit distributing a complete software distribution such as Mandriva.
So it comes down to this: who owns the font-rendering related patents? Are they actually valid patents? Is it likely that freetype infringes them? And the most important question: what are the chances that they owners will sue you?
Looking from that angle, I would ship freetype, NTFS, .doc support and SMB with no fear. I'd be more careful with MP3 and other media related stuff though...





Member since:
2007-10-16
Why isn't freetype compiled with the bytecode interpreter in Mandriva? I think Debian, ubuntu, opensuse and most of the others use it by default. Fonts without anti-aliasing looks terrible in Mandriva(thats my only complaint. 2008 rocks!
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Eudoxus: add the plf-repo(guide: http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ ) and upgrade the libfreetype-package.