> > Other Linux/BSD systems have this option enabled for a long time now, > > under them Ubuntu, Debian [2], Freebsd [3], Arch Linux [4] and more.
> > There has been a privious discussion on this list on this topic [5] > > where tedu@ mentions, that this issue is irrelevant once you get a > > decent display with a higher DPI (or use bitmap fonts), which is of > > course true [6]. But at least for me, at work we still have (and buy) > > new monitors that have a DPI of 96 (e.g. Dell U2412M). On these > > displays, bitmap fonts are too tiny for me and don't scale well, so > > subpixel rendering with enabled lcd filter really makes a difference. btw it is "li...@wrant.com" not tedu writing that. good for him/her to have a 27" high DPI display but I agree with you here. > > [1] https://www.freetype.org/patents.html "A survey from June 2007 shows no less than nine patents from Microsoft that cover ClearType." "Does FreeType Implement Any of the Patented Techniques? Technically, no. The patents cover the whole process of generating and displaying sub-pixel images. Since the font engine doesn't do the display part, it cannot infringe." ... but xenocara as a whole does display. > > [2] > > http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/f/freetype/freetype_2.5.2-3+deb8u1_changelog " * debian/patches-freetype/enable-subpixel-rendering.patch: enable subpixel rendering features, used by libcairo and xft to provide LCD colour filtering. This is considered no more or less evil than the bytecode interpreter which we also enable." this doesn't strike me as a robust evaluation of the patent situation. > > [3] http://www.freshports.org/print/freetype2/ "The following configuration options are available for freetype2-2.6.3: LCD_FILTERING=on: Sub-pixel rendering (patented)" optional and a warning about patents in the description. And FreeBSD's inclusion of CDDL code (e.g. ZFS) shows they have a different approach to patents than OpenBSD. > > [4] > > https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/0002-Enable-subpixel-rendering.patch?h=packages/freetype2 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Talk:Font_configuration - "does not require patching FreeType and Fontconfig because Arch Linux already does this. However, Arch Linux does not enable the patent encumbered settings by default" - I don't really understand what arch are doing here. > > Is there a chance to get this enabled in xenocara? I don't think there's really been enough analysis of the patent situation to give us the information to know whether enabling this by default is going to get users or OpenBSD into patent-related problems or not.
