A Possible Workaround For The S3TC Patent Situation

[droidhacker]

Which is why there is a scare about distributing binaries of patented technology in the US, UK, Germany and Japan i think.

Don't forget Canada. Same thing here.

The system was made for the rich to have the most influence, and there is nothing richer than whole corporations. People can vote, but they know their votes are next to meaningless, so the abstention is high. They can also talk, and voice their opinion (with some restrictions); but thats about it. Only the rich, organized to lobby politicians can have any influence in decision making. The system was designed as such for the believe that masses are ignorant and prone to mistakes, so better leave the important stuff to the prepared elite...

In theory, you are totally incorrect.
The problem is that the system has been bastardized. These "big evil corporations" as you put it, have the money to pay off corrupt politicians. In theory, this isn't supposed to happen. In theory, things like copyright and patent are there to enforce that these things DO NOT happen. Unfortunately, there is a huge gap between theory and reality.

A workaround is to have a degraded software experience for these countries, an "US" compiler flag... A distro could simply warn US users that, if they wish to use xy and z, they need to have paid for themselves the patent fees... Or purchase 3rd party solutions.

The whole world should not be dragged behind by the corporate greed of shortsightedness. It is unfair to say the least, and we can't expect any political changes anytime soon. They must be singled out, made ashame in the international scene, at least as deterrent for future countries falling the trap of trade agreements with the US, which ALWAYS involve modifying local laws to comply with US (corporate) laws...

While in theory, you could split things between US and non-US, this isn't a viable solution because despite what you say about distribution vs use of patented "technology", as a distro distributor.... you KNOW that your users will use that code, whether they've paid for it or not... and unfortunately, this does make you responsible in the eyes of the law.

A much better long term solution than splitting things up like that is to modify the US. At some point, it *will* become too much, and people will get pissed, and things will come to the point of revolution. Not yet though, the average American doesn't feel it yet.

[pingufunkybeat]

At the end of the day, this sentence:

If you have a history of NOT protecting your patents, then the courts will be less likely to enforce your patents when you finally do attempt to do so.

is wrong.

If the patent has not been invalidated, it will be enforced. They are not selectively enforced.

But I'm out of here. Enjoy your discussion.

[droidhacker]

At the end of the day, this sentence:

is wrong.

If the patent has not been invalidated, it will be enforced. They are not selectively enforced.

But I'm out of here. Enjoy your discussion.

What you believe is irrelevant. Everything, when in the hands of a HUMAN, is selective.
It is about the IMPORTANCE of enforcing your rights. Why is it so important NOW when it wasn't BEFORE?
Oh, so this isn't really ABOUT your IP, its about playing games. OK. DENIED.

[Plombo]

This is correct. But, to upload a precompressed texture, you need the OpenGL extension GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc, which contains both compressing in the driver, and uploading precompressed textures.

Basically, the situation is: Mesa currently cannot offer GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc because they ONLY support uploading precompressed data. If they added that string to the extensions list, they would violate the spec of the extension and could cause all kinds of incorrectness. With S2TC, they can add GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc to their extensions list, and games then detect the extension and can upload their precompressed data - without actually calling S2TC!

So you are right, in normal use, S2TC wouldn't even be called. It'd mainly serve to fulfill the extension spec of GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc, so the driver can claim support for it, which is necessary for applications/games to use it. "S2TC must be there, but it doesn't matter what it does"

If the OpenGL guys would have put compressing textures, and uploading precompressed data, into two separate extensions, we wouldn't need S2TC now.

That is true, and I completely forgot about that. Sorry.

[sabriah]

To those saying "ignore it": consider that people from the US aren't really at fault for their broken patent system and can't normally do anything about it.

It's not fair to bitch when something is US-only and "we" can't access it, and then turn around and say "fuck em" when the tables have turned.

Great work from the Xonotic developers, I hope this gets included in Mesa soon!

Noone is saying 'fuck them', just 'move on'

It is a big difference

[Plombo]

Noone is saying 'fuck them', just 'move on'

It is a big difference

They're the same thing in this case.

[smitty3268]

What you believe is irrelevant. Everything, when in the hands of a HUMAN, is selective.
It is about the IMPORTANCE of enforcing your rights. Why is it so important NOW when it wasn't BEFORE?
Oh, so this isn't really ABOUT your IP, its about playing games. OK. DENIED.

You said earlier that there were lots of cases where this had happened. Can you please point to a single example? Or is this completely based on your imagination of what you wish would happen?

[Eduard Munteanu]

To those saying "ignore it": consider that people from the US aren't really at fault for their broken patent system and can't normally do anything about it.

It's not fair to bitch when something is US-only and "we" can't access it, and then turn around and say "fuck em" when the tables have turned.

Great work from the Xonotic developers, I hope this gets included in Mesa soon!

I can only say it's your choice whether you obey the law or not. And frankly, this isn't just about clearly breaking some law or not, this whole situation is unclear and no major organisation is willing to take the risk of finding out. I can understand that, but why not shift the risk to users then?

Hypothetically speaking, how would S3 even go about enforcing this patent in case end-users violate it? And consider who's the end-user in this case. I don't think they'd have an easy time doing that.

[elanthis]

With the increase of graphics RAM and streaming texture code, this entire compression thing might as well use the ZIP algorithm just for bandwith purposes and decompress with shaders...

You don't understand how GPUs work or what texture compression accomplishes. DXTC/S3TC is specifically designed to be (near) instantly decompressable with a massively-parallel processor without needing to make a large number of memory accesses.

Deflate/gzip/lzma/etc. all require you to essentially start reading a file at the beginning and scanning through it to the part you want to access. That would mean a pixel shader goes from an O(1) operation on a simple texture access to an O(N) operation. You'd essentially slam the GPU back into the stone age by requiring that kind of texture access at runtime.

If you're implying that we should just store textures uncompressed in video memory, then you are making two very silly assumptions. First, you're assuming that having 1GB of video memory means that we can just slap uncompressed raw textures for a modern game into vmem and have room to spare; that's just ridiculously wrong. Second, you're assuming that the size of memory has no impact on performance of memory accesses inside of shaders, which is also wrong for any well-designed memory controller (especially when the underlying memory layout uses tiling to make any additional texture lookups in a particular shader likely to all closely coincide with the address of first lookup).

Thanks for the suggestion, though. I'm sure the hardware engineers and specification authors never thought of that before, ever. Your power of Internet forum logic will surely revolutionize the GPU industry and free them of the evil patent tyrants.

[smitty3268]

There are other, unpatented, texture compression schemes, though. They just aren't used as often as S3TC because that was put into DirectX a long time ago.