Comment by lstamour
4 years ago
Reading the thread itself, it’s a bit of both. Windows Terminal is complex, ClearType is complex and Unicode rendering is complex. That said… https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm does exist, does not support ClearType, but does claim to fully support Unicode. Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t use the code because (a) it’s GPLv2 and (b) it sounds like the Windows Terminal project is indeed a bit more complicated than can be hacked on over a weekend and would need extensive refactoring to support the approach. So it sounds a bit more like a brownfield problem than simply ignoring half the things it needs to do, though it probably does that too.
> Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t use the code
As good as Casey Muratori is, Microsoft is more than big enough to have the means of taking his core ideas and implement them themselves. It may not take them a couple weekends, but they should be able to spend a couple experienced man-months over this.
The fact they don't can only mean they don't care. Maybe the people at Microsoft care, but clearly the organisation as a whole as other priorities.
Besides, this is not the first time I've seen Casey complain about performance in a Microsoft product. Last time it was about boot times for Visual Studio, which he does to debug code. While reporting performance problems was possible, the form only had "less than 10s" as the shortest boot time you could tick. Clearly, they considered that if VS booted in 9 seconds or less, you don't have a performance problem at all.
> Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t use the code
I commented on a separate issue re: refterm
--- start quote ---
Something tells me that the half-a-dozen to a dozen of Microsoft developers working on Windows terminal:
- could go ahead an do the same "doctoral research" that Casey Muratori did and retrace his steps
- could pool together their not insignificant salaries and hire Casey as a consultant
- ask their managers and let Microsoft spend some of those 15.5 billion dollars of net income on hiring someone like Casey who knows what they are doing
--- end quote ---
> Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t use the code because (a) it’s GPLv2
One thing to remember is that it is always possible and acceptable to contact the author of a GPL-licensed piece of code to enquire whether they would consider granting you a commercial license.
It may not be worthwhile but if you find exactly what you're looking for and that would take you months to develop yourself then it may very well be.
Not always. GPL-licensed do not have to have a “the author”. There may be hundreds of copyright holders involved (IIRC, ¿Netscape? spent years looking for people that had to agree when it planned to change their license and rewriting parts written by people who didn’t)
Why talk in such generalities? Look at the github repo. There are only three committers to Casey's repo. I'm sure Microsoft could manage to contact them. I'm also quite sure that Microsoft has the money to entice a commercial license if they so wish.
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Sure, 'the author' may be a number of people collectively, and in that case it's probably not worth bothering.
> (a) it’s GPLv2
Why is that a problem? A GPLv2 terminal would not be a business problem for Microsoft. People would still have to buy licenses for Windows. Maybe they would lose a little face, but arguably they have already done so.
At least it’s not GPLv3 which this industry absolutely and viscerally hates (despite having no problem Apache 2.0 for some reason, Theo de Raadt is at least consistent).
If Microsoft embedded the GPLv2 terminal into Windows, Windows would have to release as GPLv2 (or compatible license). I assume they don't want that.
They can alternatively buy a commercial license, as another user said below.
You should read up on the "mere aggregation" clause of the GPLv2. It allows an OS to include a GPLv2 program without having to put the entire OS under the GPLv2. If the GPLv2 did function the way you seem to think it does, then almost every Linux distro would be in violation, too.
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> Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t use the code because (a) it’s GPLv2
That's not unfortunate. Having people who work on competing Free Software is a good thing. It would be even better if Microsoft adopted this code and complied with the terms of the GPL license. Then we won't have to deal with problems like these because they'd be nipped in the bud. And we would set the precedent to take care of lot of other problems like the malware, telemetry, abuse of users' freedoms.