Originally posted by marek
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Are the patent licenses even available for open source distribution? I could easily see the owners only licensing in the scenario where someone can't just freely copy the Mesa from Red Hat onto their own distro and run it. Regardless, that's going to take a ton of money because these licenses are not cheap.
I think the most likely scenario for access before the patents expire (starting 2018 i think?) is to do something like the fontconfig guys did. Create plugins, commented out code, etc., which individual users can activate at their own risk. I don't think the main VMWare/AMD/Intel developers are very interested in doing this, so it might have to come from the community.
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Originally posted by smitty3268 View PostAre the patent licenses even available for open source distribution? I could easily see the owners only licensing in the scenario where someone can't just freely copy the Mesa from Red Hat onto their own distro and run it. Regardless, that's going to take a ton of money because these licenses are not cheap..
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Originally posted by nanonyme View PostYou completely misunderstood. FSF/distros/whatever instance would need to buy the whole patents and then give Mesa a license.
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Originally posted by Remco View PostThis patent situation only covers S3 Texture Compression, right? This is a well known problem, and most open source games continue to work if it isn't available.
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Originally posted by smitty3268 View PostAnd that's exactly what i'm not sure they would be allowed to do, since there are an infinite number of possible copies of mesa. As opposed to just licensing it for something that's centrally controlled.
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Originally posted by smitty3268 View PostDOH! I just read your post again and you were talking about buying the entire patent rather than just licensing it. That would indeed make everything possible - although i can't even imagine how much money it would cost. Those patents are a money making machine since they've got ATI/NVidia over a barrel.
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Originally posted by Remco View PostThis patent situation only covers S3 Texture Compression, right? This is a well known problem, and most open source games continue to work if it isn't available.
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