This idea is _not_ a duplicate of earlier ideas - there are certain legal implications that may have changedt.

David Turner (one of the lead developers of Freetype), mentioned in a 2007 interview - http://www.osnews.com/story/18166/Interview_with_David_Turner_of_Freetype - about October 2009 being the date when several hinting patents expire.

This was discussed some time back on KDE forums - http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=83741 - and came up with similar conclusions.

Both of these discussions refer to a very early freetype mailing list discussion - http://osdir.com/ml/fonts.freetype.devel/2006-11/msg00007.html - which analyze these patents.

One possible caveat is that the international validity of these patents, which may last longer. For e.g. this discussion - http://www.mail-archive.com/freetype-devel@nongnu.org/msg03605.html - mentions that in France, these patents may be expiring on May 5, 2010.

Recent activity:
Ghostscript has a bug filed to review patent applicability - http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=690621 - and they want to incorporate hinting into their next release in Aug 2010. They have analyzed the patent from international angles as well.
Fedora has hinting enabled in rawhide - http://osdir.com/ml/fedora-fonts-list/2009-12/msg00003.html.

If it can be conclusively shown that hinting can indeed be now incorporated in Linux, it will lead to more software (e.g. OpenOffice, Freetype itself, Browsers, etc.) turning on hinting. This will go a long, long way in making Ubuntu look really good.

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