On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 15:14 -0500, Jud Craft wrote: > I didn't know myself for sure whether it [Qt's filter code] was > patent-infringing. But I did know: > > 1. Fedora tries not to ship patented technologies. A bit oversimplified. I remember reading some kind of patent guideline a while back, probably from spot, but googling and searching the wiki isn't bringing it up. Basically since pretty much everything is patented, "not shipping patented technology" isn't feasible. Instead it's a judgement call, we avoid patents who's owners are known to be actively seeking licensing fees or are otherwise sue happy. We can't avoid them all and still have a product to ship. > 2. Fedora took subpixel filtering (due to its possible infringement) > out of the desktop stack. Where is this coming from? Are you confusing subpixel filtering with hinting? They're two different things. > 3. Qt has its own separate filtering code. > 4. Fedora did NOT remove the Qt subpixel filters. > > Hence I began to wonder if A) Qt's filtering technique was considered > as non-infringing, and B) if so, why not just use that for the rest of > the X stack? Near as I can tell, filtering isn't the problem. MS seems to have a patent on the very idea of subpixel font rendering, it doesn't matter what you do to filter the color fringing away. > (after all, I am not a lawyer, but I thought certainly Fedora was > on good legal ground) There's no winning when it comes to software patents. Everyone is a criminal.
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