ASTC Texture Compression License Turns Out To Be Restrictive Outside Of Khronos APIs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASTC Texture Compression License Turns Out To Be Restrictive Outside Of Khronos APIs

The lossy ASTC texture compression algorithm has been widely adopted in recent years with it being official extensions to both OpenGL and OpenGL ES. While it may not be as messy as the S3TC patent situation of the past, it turns out Arm's license on Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression actually is quite restrictive outside of the context of Khronos' APIs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ASTC-Restrictive-License

[Ardje]

I probably do not understand how it works, but if I look up the ASTC specs I get a document describing the implementation of ASTC (and hence the format).
The blog post seems to only refer to the sample ASTC encoder from ARM and not the spec itself nor the samples in that spec.
See: https://www.khronos.org/registry/Ope...n_astc_hdr.txt

[Zgembo]

Outside Of Khronos APIs

And what would those be?

[Calinou]

And what would those be?

Anything Direct3D, I guess

Is the upcoming WebGPU considered to be a Khronos API as well?

[tildearrow]

And what would those be?

Tools that work with the ASTC format.

(Hopefully not drivers though!)

[tildearrow]

Hopefully it's just an oversight by Arm's lawyers

If that is indeed the case, I strongly doubt Arm is willing to accept it is an oversight out of their pure greed.

[timofonic]

If that is indeed the case, I strongly doubt Arm is willing to accept it is an oversight out of their pure greed.

Arm Holdings is so evil that it must merge with Oracle or Microsoft.

[tuxd3v]

Yes,

Outside Of Khronos APIs

and

No right is granted to use the Software to develop hardware.

ARM guys are like fox's..afraid of someone else that has encoders/decoders in hardware..??
They have already been outgunned..

ThinkSilicon Nema seems to implement compression/decompression in hardware, and they seem to beat ARM in that, and other aspects.

[azdaha]

Arm Holdings is so evil that it must merge with Oracle or Microsoft.

Really? How so?

Edit: Although, I now see that it's owned by Softbank

To answer my own question, some examples I suppose:

• https://gizmodo.com/arm-takes-down-b...rce-1827513230
• https://web.archive.org/web/20180713...rm-basics.com/

[tildearrow]

Arm Holdings is so evil that it must merge with Oracle or Microsoft.

No, please, and especially not with Oracle. They'll consume Arm entirely.

(oh wait, isn't this a good thing for RISC-V?)