What Was Decided With S3TC & Floating Points For Mesa

[dfx.]

...

I have to say I admire you, because you have a real gift. I always find it quite hard to transform my thought into words that the others could easily understand, which is something you have a natural talent for. I wished there were more people with so sound opinions and great communication skills to help spreading them, because then these motherfuckers we're talking about wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell.

second me. this is exactly what i thought reading it. this post expressed everything i wanted to say to but could never find the right words.
i even have read original mesa-dev discussion before this news was posted and have opened this forum page before any comments were posted but just could not say it good enough.

now i will put this post into my citation collection where it earned its place.

No one has publicly come out against merging the hardware support, but apparently it sounds like there was a lot of negative reactions to it in private. I think if anyone merged it, they'd get yelled at and it would just come right back out.

So we're basically where we were when this whole thing started. Nowhere. And with no one even publicly saying why.

yes, while reading this "discussion" i've got dirty feeling of FUD and that real words probably been thrown out of sigh. for fucks sake, it's like this code is some big boogeyman but there is no any substantial indication that it or its users are infringing anything and big evil patent holder-extortionist is nowhere to be found.

in my understanding, even if some "patents"(i would call them 'papers with offer you can't refuse') are grossly "infringed", "patent-holder" is not going to scaremongering and threat free&open voluntary community project. that is some black PR. if he's going to get someone, he's going for the users (remember how MS fucked bunch of small companies with imaginary "Linux patents" ?). and it's users who should decide _and bother at all_ to enable or disable that functionality.
and all that _only if_ threat is legitimate _and_ patent-holder is really an extortionating bastard.
MS example actually says even more - you _can fuck people with patents even if you don't have them_ or they highly dubious ("dubious", if we all imagine that we live in a world where patent system is something more than lawful racketeering system). so - you can be fucked either way, so better that you make it worthwhile.

most interesting part of "discussion" was Ian Romanick's:
"If we're going to make any significant changes to Mesa's S3TC support,
we might want to consider changing to a maintained library. For
example libsquish (http://code.google.com/p/libsquish/) might be a good
choice.

One advantage of having S3TC in Mesa would be that we could (finally) do
hardware accelerated compression. There's quite a bit of work published
about, for example, DXT5 compression on GPUs."

it actually says something useful, lays down a plan and puts something more than fucking FUD. apparently there is an up-to-date, maintained, _supported by Nvidia_ DXTn library and we didn't even knew it.

the worst part is Corbin Simpson's:
"Stop messing with S3TC. I think things like my previous attempt to
language-lawyer S3TC compatibility in without any patented code are a
better use of time than silly patches to shoehorn it in to the
detriment of the rest of us."
it's really interesting to know more about those "previous attempt to
language-lawyer S3TC compatibility in without any patented code" and the "detriment of the rest of us".

[yotambien]

"Open" means that the specification is available to read and study free of royalty; nothing else. You are confusing "open specifications" with "open implementations."

Not really. He was just using the concept of "open" that most of us understand (the dictionary definition of "open" justifies why I say "most of us"). On the other hand, the narrow definition of open specifications that keeps being mentioned in these discussions is ludicrous. There, "open" refers more to the piece of paper the specification is written on than to the actual object of the specification.

And again, the definition of "open standard" varies according to whom makes that definition. Only last week or so the UK government provided the terms it uses to define open standards, which require that they have "intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis". This puts the UK in line with other countries, most notably the EU.

So the confusion only exists if you decide to give more credit to the world views of Nvidia, AMD, Apple and the likes than to what common sense dictates and quite a few of (presumably) democratically elected governments throughout the world understand.

And no, it couldn't have been done any other way. There is an actual _reason_ why people want OpenGL 3 support including all of its mandatory features; you realize this, right? Floating point textures are _essential_ for many modern rendering techniques. You cannot do them without floating point textures and render buffers. Period.

That's a pity. It tells us a lot about how rotten the IP system is. Even more reason to not accept the language and definitions of those who support and impose it. If we don't, we run the risk of running out of arguments and ideas.

PS. I believe you are confusing "open implementations" with "free to implement".

[DeepDayze]

If I understand the process correctly Mesa has to be rebuild either way if the S3TC work is brought in tree or left as a library

If it's left as a library and it isn't present at compile time Mesa won't have S3TC support again as per my understanding (and I might be wrong)

I'm guessing it would be better to bring it in tree to prevent the library falling out of sync with the rest of Mesa

Yes, even if the s3tc code was brought into the tree it should still be built as a library provided the build-time switch was turned on so otherwise that library won't be built and then that particular Mesa build won't have the s3tc support or support for any other patent-restricted functions.

[?John?]

The problem we have in our country is that 'Big Government' depends on 'Big Corporations' and visa versa. Without the direct intervention of the government into capitalistic markets the major corporations couldn't survive. They would buckle under their own weight and bureaucracy.

Small/medium businesses are intensely competitive and in a open market multiple smaller players would feed off of major corporations like sharks on a whale carcass.

Major corporations know this. They see what happened with Linux versus SCO Unix, SGI Irix, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, etc etc. The see what happened with Android versus Microsoft Mobile... they know this, they understand this and they aim to use patents to prevent and control who is allowed to make software and hardware that is competitive with them.

Can't afford the patents? Then you can't afford to compete. And that is exactly how they want it.

It's the same thing with DRM. It has much less to do with piracy then it has to do with who is allowed to make compatible hardware and software. It was never about piracy. It's about _control_. Control of the markets, control of who is allowed to compete with them. It's a instrument to protect industrial cabals and it 100% depends on the government to even have a chance of working. Without government and their guns then it's a house of cards.

Unless you able to pay their fees, join their organizations, agree to their limitations, and implement their designs then they use the government as a weapon against you to prevent you from supplanting their supply chains in addition making cheaper open devices that they don't control.

Everything that you have been told about 'IP' and the purpose of DRM by the media and government institutions is a lie. It's bullshit created by the people that benefit most from the controls to trick the people into volunteering to be victims of those controls.

I have to say I admire you, because you have a real gift. I always find it quite hard to transform my thought into words that the others could easily understand, which is something you have a natural talent for. I wished there were more people with so sound opinions and great communication skills to help spreading them, because then these motherfuckers we're talking about wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell.

[smitty3268]

So basically no real objections have been forwarded and everyone is just waiting for someone else to push it to master? Seriously, if someone did that, would anyone really back it out or is there just a lot of paranoia flying about for no real good reason?

So, there were some issues with the way the software rendering code works, but legally speaking the go ahead was given to merge that code. Marek responded that he didn't care about the software renderers and wasn't going to touch that code, and no one else seems to care much about it either, judging from the lack of people looking into merging that.

No one has publicly come out against merging the hardware support, but apparently it sounds like there was a lot of negative reactions to it in private. I think if anyone merged it, they'd get yelled at and it would just come right back out.

So we're basically where we were when this whole thing started. Nowhere. And with no one even publicly saying why.

[Wyatt]

So basically no real objections have been forwarded and everyone is just waiting for someone else to push it to master? Seriously, if someone did that, would anyone really back it out or is there just a lot of paranoia flying about for no real good reason?

[drag]

They sure can ignore it, especially when corporations and lobbyists are stuffing cash into their pockets. I think a lot of Americans have become so jaded and cynical that they're hopeless about their government. I find a lot of policies insanely stupid (corporate welfare/bailouts, our health system, the War on Citizens aka the War on Drugs, etc.) I'm not one to advocate violence and revolution, but it may be one of the only effective tools we have.

The problem we have in our country is that 'Big Government' depends on 'Big Corporations' and visa versa. Without the direct intervention of the government into capitalistic markets the major corporations couldn't survive. They would buckle under their own weight and bureaucracy.

Small/medium businesses are intensely competitive and in a open market multiple smaller players would feed off of major corporations like sharks on a whale carcass.

Major corporations know this. They see what happened with Linux versus SCO Unix, SGI Irix, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, etc etc. The see what happened with Android versus Microsoft Mobile... they know this, they understand this and they aim to use patents to prevent and control who is allowed to make software and hardware that is competitive with them.

Can't afford the patents? Then you can't afford to compete. And that is exactly how they want it.

It's the same thing with DRM. It has much less to do with piracy then it has to do with who is allowed to make compatible hardware and software. It was never about piracy. It's about _control_. Control of the markets, control of who is allowed to compete with them. It's a instrument to protect industrial cabals and it 100% depends on the government to even have a chance of working. Without government and their guns then it's a house of cards.

Unless you able to pay their fees, join their organizations, agree to their limitations, and implement their designs then they use the government as a weapon against you to prevent you from supplanting their supply chains in addition making cheaper open devices that they don't control.

Everything that you have been told about 'IP' and the purpose of DRM by the media and government institutions is a lie. It's bullshit created by the people that benefit most from the controls to trick the people into volunteering to be victims of those controls.

[DanL]

If you find anything in the current legislation outrageous, stupid or both, simply start urging your representative to change that and don't forget to be persistent, because they just can't ignore the flood of mail and phone calls forever.

They sure can ignore it, especially when corporations and lobbyists are stuffing cash into their pockets. I think a lot of Americans have become so jaded and cynical that they're hopeless about their government. I find a lot of policies insanely stupid (corporate welfare/bailouts, our health system, the War on Citizens aka the War on Drugs, etc.) I'm not one to advocate violence and revolution, but it may be one of the only effective tools we have.

[89c51]

@elanthis

I probably used the wrong word there. In other words i would prefer to have something that is free for everyone to implement, read, set it on fire or shove it up his bottom if he likes to. But from your post i come to the conclusion that this would be impossible or very difficult.

As for the rest of your post i am not a Computer engineer and have no idea about the limitations of the GLSL or the OpenGL API. Write a hate/rage mail to Kronos.

[elanthis]

the bigger problem is that an open specification decided to use patented stuff IMO

i don't know however if it could be done in another way

"Open" means that the specification is available to read and study free of royalty; nothing else. You are confusing "open specifications" with "open implementations."

And no, it couldn't have been done any other way. There is an actual _reason_ why people want OpenGL 3 support including all of its mandatory features; you realize this, right? Floating point textures are _essential_ for many modern rendering techniques. You cannot do them without floating point textures and render buffers. Period.

Without floating point textures, I really don't give a shit what other OpenGL 3/4 features Mesa gains. It's useless for modern AAA game engines until there is proper floating point support. Everything else modern games do is totally possible on OpenGL 2/DirectX 9. Geometry shaders, hardware tessellation, and so on are nice and useful but are not as essential.

The only other thing that the newer OpenGL versions bring with them that is essential is instanced rendering (which is already available as an extension in Mesa, so that's all good) and newer versions of GLSL that are ever so slightly less retarded than the original GLSL. (But GLSL still sucks. Nobody serious is using it directly; I've yet to meet anyone who didn't vastly prefer HLSL or Cg, and Cg only when portability is essential -- that's how bad GLSL is. For the simple graphics stuff I do it's fine, but the graphics pros I work with uniformly despise it, and the OpenGL API in general. That includes the ones who learned OpenGL before DirectX, I might note, so don't claim it's bias from familiarity. Mostly the GLSL complains all revolve around how hard it is to build advanced runtime effects composition layers, which was actually literally impossible to do right until GLSL 4.10/3.30, and even with those it's still way harder to get right than with HLSL/Cg.).