It's Official: Mesa 8.0 With OpenGL 3.0

[sandain]

Microsoft = Office Suite + DirectX. This is enough to explain why Linux will never get into the Desktop Market.

OSS = Linux + LibreOffice + Mesa. How does your statement preclude Linux from the Desktop Market?

[bulletxt]

Microsoft = Office Suite + DirectX. This is enough to explain why Linux will never get into the Desktop Market.

[bridgman]

I'll expand. "You can't implement OpenGL, because it is the IP of SGI, Khronos, etc.".

OK, you can't call it OpenGL because that is a TRADEMARK. Mesa doesn't call itself OpenGL and never has. Big companies like to use the term IP so you can't guess what it is they own.

If a company says you can't use their marks, then you could avoid the legal problems by just not using their marks. If they say "that is our IP", you don't know what they mean. Is it copyright on their code? Is it a trade mark? Did they patent something? Who knows. That's the point of the confusing and malicious term of "Intellectual Property".

OK, so your problem isn't really with the term itself, you just want a whole lot more detail. Put bluntly, you're not going to get that from Engineering folks, only from Legal.

Everyone who uses that term does so with the deliberate and malicious intent of confusing the listener.

Simply not true, at least in my case. I don't know about other people.

It's not about expedience, it is about confusion. How much less expedient is it to say "trademark", "patent", or "copyright"? it might take a few more seconds but it clarifies what your'e talking about. If you want to be obtuse, you will say "IP".

Again, not true. It's extremely rare that a single issue is the problem. I though you didn't like the choice of catch-all term, but what you're saying is that you want individual legal issues split out in detail. I can't do that, and I doubt that engineering folks in any company would be able to do that. The options are "provide as much information as we can and no more" or "don't say anything".

[AnonymousCoward]

I have offered a few times to use something different if someone can come up with a good catch-all word that covers trade secrets, patents, copyrighted code, along with anything similar that I might have forgotten to mention. So far I have received a few rants back but nothing I could actually use in a sentence

"Imaginary property"?

[drag]

Whatever happened with this: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=OTkxMQ ???
Anybody hear of any progress in this investigation?

I am sorry. I have forgotten about it. It would be interesting to know if it actually gets ruled invalid. It's very rare that that tactic actually works. It's like pleading temporary insanity. It's only used in less then 1% of the cases and when it is used it's usually last ditch effort and only wins a tiny fraction of the time.

I have offered a few times to use something different if someone can come up with a good catch-all word that covers trade secrets, patents, copyrighted code, along with anything similar that I might have forgotten to mention. So far I have received a few rants back but nothing I could actually use in a sentence

Obvious terms like "secrets" don't work because we're really talking about a mix of "secrets" and "legally protected" stuff. The best I could come up with was "secret sauce" but that's kinda hokey too.

You can't.

Trademarks have nothing to do with secrets or keeping things restricted. It is just to document you produced a certain item and nobody else can claim that their knock-off products was created by you.

Copyrights are not about keeping anything secret either. It's about restricting the types of copying you can do of certain, specific, and abritrary types of goods.

Patents are not about keeping secrets. In fact they are suppose to do the entire opposite. You are suppose to be putting your inventions into the public domain in order to get a patent in the first place.

What is more trademarks are not suppose to stop people from copying your products. Patents are not about copying either. Only copyrights are about copying. With patents you violate patents whether or not you invented something independently yourself and you just happen to accidentally do something covered by a patent or you intentionally copied a patent document it is not relevent, except in when awarding damages. It makes no difference if you copied or it was independently created.

The fact that people can dream up scenarios were any of these three things can be used to create secrecy or restricted access to information goes to show how fundamentally broke and corrupt the very concept of IP is.

Now the only truly legitimate form of IP, in my opinion, is going to be trade secrets. People sign NDAs to work on stuff they need to follow those NDAs. If a corporation wants to keep something secret they should be able to. However if somebody is able to reverse engineer their product and use that knowledge then that is 100% OK also. It's all fair game.

The only legit restrictions that people should be required to follow are ones that they volunteered for and agreed to follow.


Now with video cards you also have additional things like DMCA... which is so much screaming heaping bullshit I cannot even begin to fathom. Ostensibly it's about piracy, but it is in fact a cold, very purposeful, completely deliberate and malicious (from a free market standpoint) set of laws and punishments designed to leverage copyright to provide the large international media corporations (and friends) the ability to dictate software and hardware design for the sole purpose of maintaining market dominance and controlling distribution channels. You obey 'Hollywood' or the government will shut you down.

[DaemonFC]

I'll expand. "You can't implement OpenGL, because it is the IP of SGI, Khronos, etc.".

OK, you can't call it OpenGL because that is a TRADEMARK. Mesa doesn't call itself OpenGL and never has. Big companies like to use the term IP so you can't guess what it is they own.

If a company says you can't use their marks, then you could avoid the legal problems by just not using their marks. If they say "that is our IP", you don't know what they mean. Is it copyright on their code? Is it a trade mark? Did they patent something? Who knows. That's the point of the confusing and malicious term of "Intellectual Property".

Everyone who uses that term does so with the deliberate and malicious intent of confusing the listener. It's not about expedience, it is about confusion. How much less expedient is it to say "trademark", "patent", or "copyright"? it might take a few more seconds but it clarifies what your'e talking about. If you want to be obtuse, you will say "IP".

[DaemonFC]

I have offered a few times to use something different if someone can come up with a good catch-all word that covers trade secrets, patents, copyrighted code, along with anything similar that I might have forgotten to mention. So far I have received a few rants back but nothing I could actually use in a sentence

Obvious terms like "secrets" don't work because we're really talking about a mix of "secrets" and "legally protected" stuff. The best I could come up with was "secret sauce" but that's kinda hokey too.

I still don't understand why you can't say. "We can't do this because it is copyright restricted" "We can't do that because someone has a patent they won't let us use."

If you can't say what you mean, then you can't mean what you say. When you say "IP" you could be talking about several very different legal frameworks meant for very different situations. It's a term intended to shotgun and confuse "simple folk" who aren't lawyers, and suggest that there's some all-powerful unified legal "We own that, end of story" framework. There is no such thing, at least in the US. I guess a few more bribes to congress could fix that though.

[bridgman]

BTW, I get worked up when I hear someone use the term "intellectual property" because I rightly get the mental image of an unholy coven of corporate lawyers scheming on how they can get me to pay to use my own property. Bridgman of AMD uses that term a lot and it really pisses me off.

I have offered a few times to use something different if someone can come up with a good catch-all word that covers trade secrets, patents, copyrighted code, along with anything similar that I might have forgotten to mention. So far I have received a few rants back but nothing I could actually use in a sentence

Obvious terms like "secrets" don't work because we're really talking about a mix of "secrets" and "legally protected" stuff. The best I could come up with was "secret sauce" but that's kinda hokey too.

[DaemonFC]

Everybody does.. The whole S3TC situation and software patents in general is complete BS. Patents are there to reward innovators so that they can keep innovating and creating great new things for the good of all people.. Companies abuse the hell out of the patent system and turned it upside down and now use it to screw over other companies as well as the public to block all competition...

Then they take all their money they made from screwing over other people and put it towards lobbying the government.

The system is quite broken.

I understand why AMDs employees trip all over themselves to be nice to their employer, which is one of the offenders. I just don't think I could ever contain myself long enough to get a job for a company that expected me to tow that line.

[Sidicas]

BTW, I get worked up when I hear someone use the term "intellectual property" because I rightly get the mental image of an unholy coven of corporate lawyers scheming on how they can get me to pay to use my own property. Bridgman of AMD uses that term a lot and it really pisses me off.

Everybody does.. The whole S3TC situation and software patents in general is complete BS. Patents are there to reward innovators so that they can keep innovating and creating great new things for the good of all people.. Companies abuse the hell out of the patent system and turned it upside down and now use it to screw over other companies as well as the public to block all competition...

Then they take all their money they made from screwing over other people and put it towards lobbying the government.

The system is quite broken.