Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Patents May Cause Issues For OpenGL 3 In Mesa

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #21
    Originally posted by Ant P. View Post
    My opinion has always been "screw 'em, they can't sue us all".

    Whose fault are these patents, and do they have any products we can boycott?
    Boycott window$, mp3, h264, doc, aac, wma, wmv, flash and macosx for the begining...

    Comment


    • #22
      patents suck hard... i hate them....

      Comment


      • #23
        Originally posted by MostAwesomeDude View Post
        Ogg 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.
        i was under the impression that it was a patented format, for the purpose that free use could not be contested.

        Comment


        • #24
          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.
          that means that some patent-aware distros (e.g. fedora) will roll out crippled mesa by default. (yay for gentoo - users will be able to choose it at build-time).

          i wonder how is canonical going to explain this to ubuntu users? yet another patent warning some of them will have to click through :/

          Comment


          • #25
            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.

            Comment


            • #26
              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 Post
              Boycott window$, mp3, h264, doc, aac, wma, wmv, flash and macosx for the begining...
              S3 holds the S3TC patents. You already boycott them just by not knowing about their products. Microsoft has the ability to sub-license S3TC with their DXTC technology; you cannot avoid this fee, as it is included in the cost of every video card you have ever purchased.

              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 Post
              i was under the impression that it was a patented format, for the purpose that free use could not be contested.
              You are confusing copyrights and patents. Patents have no concept of free use.

              Originally posted by V!NCENT View Post
              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?
              I am not a lawyer.

              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.

              Comment


              • #27
                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.

                Comment


                • #28
                  Originally posted by drag View Post
                  Can you actually read the page? "Depending on where you live, you might need a valid license for s3tc in order to be legally allowed to use the external library." That is no precedent, the author just says that if the user happens to violate patents, the author can't be sued. Also the author left the project and quit.
                  Last edited by nanonyme; 01 October 2009, 04:03 PM.

                  Comment


                  • #29
                    Originally posted by MostAwesomeDude View Post
                    We will be adding compile-time flags to Mesa for several features over the next few weeks.
                    For the OGG lovin Freetards like me who don't want any proprietary crap, can you elaborate on what impact the lack of said features will have on my desktop? Is it safe to assume we are just talking about losing a chunk of performance here, and that major features like Gallium3D, Clutter, and all that stuff will still work?

                    Comment


                    • #30
                      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 >.>

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X