I've heard of the free-type patents and I found references to the patenting of OS dock (hasn't end free docks in Linux as far as I can see - especially, the Gnome Shell look a lot like a dock).
I oppose that Free-type patents like all software patents but they don't scare me too much because sub-pixel rendering's value is debatable and it's not something that should affect programming at a higher level.
On the other hand, in the context of the thread, when rbanffy said "Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around", in response to "truncation in OS X is much much smarter", he seemed to imply there were patents on the level of simply truncating text.
joe_the_user|15 years ago
I oppose that Free-type patents like all software patents but they don't scare me too much because sub-pixel rendering's value is debatable and it's not something that should affect programming at a higher level.
On the other hand, in the context of the thread, when rbanffy said "Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around", in response to "truncation in OS X is much much smarter", he seemed to imply there were patents on the level of simply truncating text.
Are there?
If there are, it sound horrible.