FreeType and patents [Re: further notes on using Pango]

[Alan Horkan]

> Myself included but not too many church secretaries
> are going to edit their FreeType makefile and rebuild
> to get AbiWord to antialias like all their other
> software already does automatically.

church secretaries!  understatement of the week.
i should get in the habit of compiling from source, but computer
users who do compile from source a rare minority of a minority.

Where does Apple hold these patents?
To what extent can we turn this on and then have a HUGE DISCLAIMER that
Americans and others with crazy patent laws may not use it.  According
to FreeType.org some distributions turn it on by default.

Anyone care to ask apple for a license [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?
Apple dont seem to be pursuing this very aggessively.

It might be a problem for anyone wishing to commerially distribute Abiword
but is anyone considered to be commercially distributing Abiword at the
moment (i dont inlcuding it in a distributions counts, but im no expert).

http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Sincerely
Alan Horkan