Microsoft Open-Sources Edge's WebGL Implementation

[boxie]

Cool - MS are steadily growing their OSS credentials. This is a far cry from the MS of the past.

[Michael_S]

Note that it's under the MIT license, not GPL. We should not take for granted that the work someone else put the time into has been made available to us for the sake of use, example, or even education. Even if it's by a company with a spotty track record like Microsoft, note that once you put code like that up with an MIT license, you cannot do a takesies backsies. It's out their for good and is a large step for some people or companies, even if that code may be not very useful to others.

The code is available under the MIT license, but the patent statement that Microsoft issues with it allows for the possibility that Microsoft could license their patents related to the code to a third party and have that party sue anyone that actually uses the code in a way Microsoft doesn't like.

I know that's a bit 'out there', but considering the company history they have earned distrust.

[computerquip]

The code is available under the MIT license, but the patent statement that Microsoft issues with it allows for the possibility that Microsoft could license their patents related to the code to a third party and have that party sue anyone that actually uses the code in a way Microsoft doesn't like.

I know that's a bit 'out there', but considering the company history they have earned distrust.

I'm going to ask despite already knowing the answer and despite the straw man that it is. What is there to support your argument that this is even remotely legal to do? The closest thing you can get to this is misappropriation and that will never slide with source code that's provided a written copyright license agreement in the root of the directory, as a link on their webpage, and in every single readable file just to be on the safe side.

[stan-qaz]

Put the code up under the MIT licence, hope to get lots of free help improving the code, take the code back inside MS and make more modifications that follow the usual MS, embrace, extend, extinguish pattern of making use of useful idiots.

Nope, GPL'd code is all I'm interested in at this point.

[computerquip]

Also just because source code is available to read doesnt mean its open. Microsoft has done this plenty of times before in the past.

Really? In which case did it not mean open-source? If you want to get into a subjective understanding of what open-source means, you're not going to win or lose. Surely you're not that close minded though.

So it has nothing to do with drivers? But then you give crappy intel drivers as an example. Well tell intel to fix their drivers then and stop this bs. See how fast they will fix it. Its not like the drivers do anything wih glsl anyway... like compiling.

They most likely already have a backend based on DirectX and HLSL. They probably don't see the effort worth making a backend for both.

Additionally, it's just one way of doing things. Shader compilation is not designed to be fast. Is it better to implement an entirely new compiler or simply translate to the one compiler they know is good and optimized? For instance, PyPy does this by translating to C to pretty good results.

Do you have anything useful to add? Glsl->hlsl is the most retarded thing i heard of. I cant think of a single reason to do something like that. I guess neither can you.

The idea that someone did something that you don't immediately understand doesn't make it retarded. What is retarded is that I'm forced into defending Microsoft because of your blatant ignorance and for moral consistency concerning FOSS.

[computerquip]

Put the code up under the MIT licence, hope to get lots of free help improving the code, take the code back inside MS and make more modifications that follow the usual MS, embrace, extend, extinguish pattern of making use of useful idiots.

Nope, GPL'd code is all I'm interested in at this point.

Is there any case where this has happened ever? As a matter of fact, the only case I can think of is Nexuiz off the top of my head which was licensed under GPLv2. Xonotic was still made from that though and it's still kicking to this day. What point are you trying to make?

EDIT: Cadega/TransGaming also comes to mind. WINE still won here where Cadega retired in 2011 and WINE continued.

[timofonic]

Is there any case where this has happened ever? As a matter of fact, the only case I can think of is Nexuiz off the top of my head which was licensed under GPLv2. Xonotic was still made from that though and it's still kicking to this day. What point are you trying to make?

EDIT: Cadega/TransGaming also comes to mind. WINE still won here where Cadega retired in 2011 and WINE continued.

- BSDs: Most known and recent case is FreeBSD and Playstation 4, but there's tons others in Samsung and Apple's Mac OS X.

Advanced code obfuscation techniques can even make GPL violations very tricky to detect, too.

[tegs]

Not saying anything for sure... but often times Microsoft "open source" means a bunch of setup just so it can make a call into something (that does the work) that is not open source. We'll see (or not see).

Reminds me of the amdgpu driver added to the Linux kernel that people are claiming to be FLOSS, but requires non-free binary firmware. Don't believe me? Check out the Linux Libre project: http://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/linux-libre/

[smitty3268]

Reminds me of the amdgpu driver added to the Linux kernel that people are claiming to be FLOSS, but requires non-free binary firmware. Don't believe me? Check out the Linux Libre project: http://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/linux-libre/

It's interesting that people always mention AMD graphics when they bring up this topic, and not all the other hardware that does it. I'm not exactly sure why that is.

[computerquip]

- BSDs: Most known and recent case is FreeBSD and Playstation 4, but there's tons others in Samsung and Apple's Mac OS X.

Advanced code obfuscation techniques can even make GPL violations very tricky to detect, too.

FreeBSD is meant for a handful of various platforms. The fact that people like Sony modified the software to their specific platform in no way politically or technically hurts FreeBSD. That's the *entire point* and one of the few cases where it's not completely looked down upon. There isn't a whole lot that Sony can contribute back that would be useful for the current goals of FreeBSD, while Sony is also avoiding any complicated licensing issues that would be attached to say a GPL-based system.

Also given that Apple is what started projects like Clang, I can't fathom where you're going with that.

I'm also not sure what Samsung used and not contributed back to?