Just to clarify ...

At 6:24 AM -0800 12/11/99, Henrik Gedenryd wrote:
>agree at carltonfields.com wrote:
>
>> At least get the patents (all of which are available both in printable and
>> text-searchable form at http:www.uspto.gov) and see what is claimed.
>>Then, at
>> least, you can be assured that you are practicing the prior art.
>>
>> (And hey, there is nothing MORE FUN than "engineering around" a patent,
>>trust
>> me!  Its easy to do, particularly in "crowded art" areas as Alan suggests
>> Truetype finds itself, and its usually successful when undertaken.)
>
>
>Just to make things clearer: What is it that "we" are afraid of here; is it
>the lincense for FreeType held by its developers, or some general patents
>(presumably related to TT) that we might infringe on? In the first case, why
>not just ask the FT developers what they think about what we want to do?

I did write David Turner of FreeType and he is happy to let us use their
plugin for all purposes. (You can see their very unrestricted license on
freetype.org).

 In
>the second case, why might this harm us if the FreeType stuff is already
>allowed to be out there? Is there anything I'm missing here? Forgive us
>international subscribers, our only education in the US legal system comes
>from "LA Law". (And software patent suits aren't sexy enough to get onto
>Ally McBeal.)

The FreeType people did a "clean room" renderer of TrueType formats -- but
they are worried that they might still have infringed one or more of the
claims in the the TT patents held by Apple. I'm not so worried, given the
amount of prior art ... and also "engineering around" can be fun, as stated
above.
     In any case, we really need superfast antialiased font rendering in
Squeak!

Cheers,

Alan