| Clearing up the Novell ClearType controversy |
Apr. 10, 2007
A recent story on the "Boycott Novell" website reported that "Novell's Linux is losing features which supposedly infringe on Microsoft software patents." That, according to Novell director of public relations Bruce Lowry, is not at all the case.
The story got its start as a bug report on an openSUSE mailing list. This report was about FreeType, a program enabling better display of fonts, not delivering sub-pixel anti-aliasing. In the discussion, a FreeType header file was shown. Part of this file read:
/* Uncomment the line below if you want to activate sub-pixel rendering */
/* (a.k.a. LCD rendering, or ClearType) in this build of the library. */
/* Note that this feature is covered by several Microsoft patents */
/* and should not be activated in any default build of the library" */
For all intents and purposes, this has the effect of knocking out ClearType's main functionality.
ClearType is a Microsoft technology. Microsoft claims that "With ClearType running on an LCD monitor, we can now display features of text as small as a fraction of a pixel in width." The company released ClearType under a "shared source" license in 2003. However, Microsoft also claims that ClearType is covered by no less than 10 patents. Microsoft also claims that there are more patents to come for ClearType.
At Planete Beranger, a blog about "Open Source and Strong Opinions," the author wrote that someone had "complained about encountering the side-effects of Microsoft patents on ClearType in... openSUSE 10.2!" He believed that this was strange because "no matter Novell and Microsoft are now buddies, openSUSE still has to be concern about the ClearType patents! Unbelievable."
From this, Roy Schestowitz, a leader of the Boycott Novell site wondered, "Is this the direction taken? Will it expand? Will features be stripped in order to cripple GNU/Linux? In any event, Novell does nobody any favours here, except Microsoft of course, which can now intimidate other distributors."
A closer look at the situation revealed, however, that David Turner, FreeType's main author had removed ClearType functionality from FreeType because of concerns about Microsoft's patents.
By September 2006, Turner had become aware of these issues and decided to steer clear of ClearType in his program. Turner wrote on September 24 that "My final understanding is that the MS patents pretty cover *all* cases of LCD-specific rendering we're interested in." While "there are some pretty well-known prior art that could be used to dismiss some claims on some of the patents is obvious, but this is not enough to get rid of all claims in the patents that really interest us." Therefore, Since finding this prior art, if *only* it exists, will take a long time, the responsible thing to do now is simply to disable the feature in the code we distribute."
If the FreeType code had been Novell's, the Linux company might already be doing the digging for that prior code. In Lowry's response to the issue, he cited Novell's questions and answers on the Microsoft patent deal. For example: "It has always been our policy in all development, open source and proprietary, to stay away from code that infringes another's patents, and we will continue to develop software using these standard practices. If any of our code is found to infringe someone else's patents, we will try to find prior technology to invalidate the patents, rework the code to design around the infringement, or as a last resort remove the functionality."
However, Lowry continued, "In this specific case, the ClearType font is supplied as part of the freetype2 package; last summer the upstream maintainer changed the package's default settings to disable Clear Type and thereby avoid possibly relevant Microsoft patents. So, consistent with Novell's preexisting practices and current policy, Novell is using the default settings established by the upstream maintainer. Distributions such as Fedora made the same choice. This issue only came up in the summer of 2006 and therefore older distributions are using the previous default (enabled ClearType)."
So, although this story illustrates just how software patent issues can wind their way into open-source software, it doesn't appear to have any direct link to the Microsoft/Novell partnership or the issues, such as the GPLv3 revision, that surround it.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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