On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 21:46 +0900, Dmitry Timoshkov wrote:
Could you enlighten me by listing those "good reasons" here? I suspect that the real "problem" with licensing the patented technologies in Linux is a general stance of GPL and Linux crowd regarding software patents making them "non-free".
IIRC the reason Red Hat gives is that even if they license the technology, it would mean legal problems for their customers since they will not be able to redistribute the product further (i.e. Fedora Core)
Regardless, it doesn't really matter. Personally I would prefer to have the hinter on, believe me, but Red Hat would not budge, and they are a very popular distribution.
The release is too close to change anything. Even if every distro decides to buy the license, it still wouldn't change anything, as it would take a while to get that onto people's machines.
Let's make sure Wine works well on the majority of boxes, and those don't have the hinter enabled (I used to compile the freetype RPM myself but I gave up since after each yum-update that updated it the system would look crappy). We can have a registry setting for that, if people can recompile freetype, they can tweak wine.