Pressing On For Mesa Floating Point Support

[Nobu]

This made me laugh out loud. Am I more important than I though?

I guess that depends on how important you thought you were.

Just thought I'd mention it, since the thread was otherwise quiet. And sometimes it's quite an important job, breaking the ice.

[BlackStar]

Wikipedia (en, fr, de) does not mention something substantial about patent issues of OpenGL.

Not even on the discussion pages. It is not likely that the problem is (or can be) widely received!

https://www.khronos.org/files/ip-disclosures/opengl/

[V!NCENT]

Hey Linux user, you just installed Linux, but do you also want to have some badass OpenGL? (y/N)
$y
This requires that you have gcc installed. Do you want to install gcc? (Y/n)
$Y
.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. done!
$_

"No we don't ship it in a working state, sir. No the user has to explicitly state that he or she wants to compile and install it after the installation."

Lol nice

[timofonic]

He should. Dave Airlie's comment in the other thread is pretty concincing in that the Corporate Masters won't allow it in Mesa main.

Oh, and non-US-based distros too, they can then claim "Free OpenGL 3 out of the box!!", just like some distros did with Freetype when that was patented.

Well, I always thinked MESA should have their own Foundation instead having Corporate Masters (TM). LibreOffice case made me think about it, the same about CUPS being owned by Apple (Computer) Inc.

Maybe in the future there should be a Libre Source Confederation? It seems something from the imagination of a Star Trek nerd, but who knows...

[curaga]

Haha, no, that's not what it's like.

It's a branch, a git branch, which he's trying to get merged into the mesa. A fork isn't the same thing as a branch. He's not trying to get popular 3rd party repositories to carry his branch.

He should. Dave Airlie's comment in the other thread is pretty concincing in that the Corporate Masters won't allow it in Mesa main.

Oh, and non-US-based distros too, they can then claim "Free OpenGL 3 out of the box!!", just like some distros did with Freetype when that was patented.

[mattst88]

That's essentially what Marek has already done, maintaining support for this in his own private branch.

Now we just have to convince everyone to start using that branch instead of master - the distros won't because of patent concerns, but if we could get the popular 3rd party repositories to package it that would be a good start.

Haha, no, that's not what it's like.

It's a branch, a git branch, which he's trying to get merged into the mesa. A fork isn't the same thing as a branch. He's not trying to get popular 3rd party repositories to carry his branch.

[smitty3268]

If they don't merge it, we'll have to fork mesa. It would be inevitable. Open source should never be restricted to a few selected people. Options should be made available to include as many people as possible.

That's essentially what Marek has already done, maintaining support for this in his own private branch.

Now we just have to convince everyone to start using that branch instead of master - the distros won't because of patent concerns, but if we could get the popular 3rd party repositories to package it that would be a good start.

[frief]

... support into mainline Mesa but hiding these patented features behind ...

Wikipedia (en, fr, de) does not mention something substantial about patent issues of OpenGL.

Not even on the discussion pages. It is not likely that the problem is (or can be) widely received!

[mattst88]

If they don't merge it, we'll have to fork mesa. It would be inevitable. Open source should never be restricted to a few selected people. Options should be made available to include as many people as possible.

Yeah... best of luck with that. Are you planning to do the development after the fork?

Wasn't that the reason XFree86 was forked and X.Org born?

The fork happened ostensibly because of a licensing change, but also because of the difficulty in getting patches accepted. The new license, while only slightly changed, made it incompatible with the GPL.

There are lots of good articles about the whole saga, here's one http://www.osnews.com/story/6157/X-M...-of-Past-Year/

By the way, Matt Turner made an appearance in the thread. Nothing spectacular, just a little comment. ;-)

This made me laugh out loud. Am I more important than I though?

[pvtcupcakes]

Thanks...strange how they put it on a different list, but I guess I should have guessed. ^^;

Anyway, that looks like it's just a patch to add the flag which can be used to enable the patented features. I don't see the actual feature patch or a link to a branch anywhere.

By the way, Matt Turner made an appearance in the thread. Nothing spectacular, just a little comment. ;-)

This is the branch:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~mareko/mesa/log/?h=floating2

The top 11 or so commits by Marek is what would be merged into mesa. The last 3 by Marek were already merged.
It isn't designed to be an external library as far as I can tell.