Originally posted by Ant P.
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Patents May Cause Issues For OpenGL 3 In Mesa
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Originally posted by MostAwesomeDude View PostOgg is not patented.
Vorbis is not patented; some companies have claimed to hold patents against it, but Xiph is confident that it is legally okay to develop and distribute Vorbis.
Theora is patented, but the patents are all well-known and have been released under a very liberal license, effectively making Theora as free as, if not freer than, Vorbis.
S3TC is patented.
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It will be up to distros and individual users to decide which features they would like to build into their Mesas. Some features will be enabled by default, some will not.
i wonder how is canonical going to explain this to ubuntu users? yet another patent warning some of them will have to click through :/
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Why does Linux have to support OpenGL3? Why can't we do the same thing like Wine does (DirectX10->OpenGL2, same graphics)? Just have a OpenGL3 to OpenGL2 parser? What will the performance penalty be like? How old are the patents? In other words how long would this translator have to last?
PS: Wait a minute... floating textures... Is OpenCL in danger?Last edited by V!NCENT; 01 October 2009, 02:23 PM.
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Please be less dense, gentlmen; I cannot offer legal advice and I am trying quite hard to describe the situation without saying something wrong or stupid.
Originally posted by Apopas View PostBoycott window$, mp3, h264, doc, aac, wma, wmv, flash and macosx for the begining...
SGI holds floating-point texture and framebuffer patents. Like S3, you don't actually buy anything they make.
If you're feeling proactive, you could attempt to boycott Sorenson, holder of h.264, by refusing to buy anything with h.264 abilities, or Apple, with whom they are deeply linked. Again, this ability is in most discrete video cards, so a boycott will not work.
Originally posted by L33F3R View Posti was under the impression that it was a patented format, for the purpose that free use could not be contested.
Originally posted by V!NCENT View PostWhy does Linux have to support OpenGL3? Why can't we do the same thing like Wine does (DirectX10->OpenGL2, same graphics)? Just have a OpenGL3 to OpenGL2 parser? What will the performance penalty be like? How old are the patents? In other words how long would this translator have to last?
PS: Wait a minute... floating textures... Is OpenCL in danger?
An OpenGL 3.x stack would need to implement floating-point renderbuffers. Translation layers are not magically exempt; you seem to be under the impression that Wine's actions are expressly for legal reasons. (Microsoft probably does not have any legal recourse against implementations of DirectX that it has not authorized, for the same reason that it cannot prevent implementations of Win32 API from existing.)
OpenCL stacks may be exposed to the same issues as OpenGL 3.x stacks.
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There is precedence for S3TC.
If Mesa can implement as much as OpenGL 3 as possible and use workarounds for patented features, even if they are not 100% compatible, then allow users to add a library file to get the patented features then I expect that would be acceptable work around.
The most important thing is that you retain API compatibility with applications. Even if it's slow or ugly it does not really matter a whole lot.. just as long as it can run without crashing.
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Originally posted by drag View PostLast edited by nanonyme; 01 October 2009, 04:03 PM.
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Originally posted by MostAwesomeDude View PostWe will be adding compile-time flags to Mesa for several features over the next few weeks.
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Good god...
Software patents: not now, not ever.
ESPECIALLY not now, when the 3D GNU/Linux desktop is rapidly being reworked.
Here's hoping the Mesa devs (and any distros that enable patented features) are not sued.
Nothing like a good patent minefield to slow progress >.>
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