Some Open Office Development Crippled by Legal "Chilling Effects" - More Proof of Suppressed Competition & Innovation.

I posted this on slashdot.org as well under the title (due to their shorter title size limits) as:

Open Office Development Crippled by Legal "Chilling Effects".

Here is even more proof of the "chilling effects" caused by overly-far-reaching legal decisions, patents, and other "intellectual Property" laws:

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=20370

For those who do not wish to read through the bug/feature report dialogue, the summary is as follows; They have closed the feature request to "embed" fonts in Open Office documents, and listed it as "Won't Fix" due to fears over legal issues, even for embedding completley "open" fonts. These fears are not unfounded of course, as they indicate from commenting about their interpretation of the meaning of the legal decision regarding the case "Adobe versus ITC", but surely there must be _some_ solution in some way.

I have asked EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation - http://www.eff.org ) to take a look at this to see if there are any options. It is early yet, and I have not yet heard back from the voice and email messages I left late this afternoon. Not considering development on this feature is a SIGNIFICANT crippling of the ability for OpenOffice to compete with products such as Microsoft Office, and just one more indicator of how fears over legal harrassment, even from different countries than where the devleopers are located in, where it is perfectly legal for such development (Skylarov/Adobe issue for example). This is just one more indication of how such IP "legal" abuses and intimidation are crippling innovation around the globe.

I have commented on my blog and technology talk radio show over the years about how I have observed (albeit however subjectively) the recent decline in technology innovation being available to the general public. I can not count the numerous technologies I have watched be shelved, never attempted, or kept only "in house" in recent years just due to fears over legal entanglements. This has stopped many individuals, companies and groups from even beginning the process of creating great solutions due to legal fears.