There's A Patent Issue With Open-Source Doom 3

[allquixotic]

Hat's off to Carmack for trying to protect the community from patent infringement risks. IIRC, it would be 100% fine for id Software to publish the source code of software that uses an algorithm covered by a patent. You can wear around a patent implementation (in some popular source language) on a t-shirt; perfectly legal. What you can't do is compile that code and have a computer execute the instructions generated. That's the infringing act. This is why ffmpeg as a project can continue (risk-free) to do its development and source distribution, despite carrying a boatload of patent-infringing codecs' source code.

Carmack and/or his lawyers could've decided to be indifferent about the issue in regards to downstream consumers of their code knowingly (or unknowingly) infringing on this patent; and we'd only find out years later when some hobby project based on the Doom 3 engine got sued by Creative.

It's even more impressive that Carmack is doing this considering that it's not his patent that is under discussion; it's a patent owned by another company, who has been a thorn in his side in the past (I assume that he's had to make license arrangements with Creative to use the patent in such a large-scale, popular game as Doom 3, and all the other id games since).

My feeling is that modern hardware can probably chew through any added complexity that would be necessary to work around this patent. This isn't as deal-breaking as S3TC or (even more deal-breaking) floating-point textures; this is basically a performance optimization that happens to deliver good visual quality at the same time. But we don't have to care much about such optimizations because the current-gen GPUs are probably at least 10 times faster than what they designed Doom 3 for.

[Iksf]

Carmack rocks, nuff said

[yogi_berra]

This isn't the first time this patent has bitten them on the arse, why are they only just realising now that it's an issue? They were forced by Creative Labs to include EAX support into the game as part of the licensing of the patent.

He was probably working under the impression that the gpl3 patent indemnification clause would make everything alright. The lawyers obviously thought otherwise.

[XorEaxEax]

He was probably working under the impression that the gpl3 patent indemnification clause would make everything alright. The lawyers obviously thought otherwise.

Take your GPL hatred elsewhere troll, this has nothing to do with it. GPLv3 patent indemnification only says that if you release something you've patented under gplv3 you can't sue people for using it. The only way GPLv3 would be relevant to this discussion is if Creative had released source code with their patented technique under GPLv3.

As for Carmack putting down the effort to work around Creative's patent in order to release Doom 3 as open source, that's incredible generous and massive kudos to him!

[deanjo]

This isn't the first time this patent has bitten them on the arse, why are they only just realising now that it's an issue? They were forced by Creative Labs to include EAX support into the game as part of the licensing of the patent.

This I would really like to know since it was a hot topic of debate when Doom 3 was being released as to how it would effect releasing the source code at a later date. This issue has been known about for years by iD Tech enthusiasts, how is it that the man that was involved in the whole bru-ha-ha so many years ago with creative forget about such a huge issue that gave him grief even before releasing Doom 3?

[Ex-Cyber]

My wild-assed guess is that Creative granted id some kind of sublicensing ability in order to avoid a situation where each developer/publisher using id Tech 4 would need to negotiate a separate license, Carmack thought it would be covered by that, and the lawyers thought the grant was too limited to apply.

[deanjo]

My wild-assed guess is that Creative granted id some kind of sublicensing ability in order to avoid a situation where each developer/publisher using id Tech 4 would need to negotiate a separate license, Carmack thought it would be covered by that, and the lawyers thought the grant was too limited to apply.

I would hope a man that intelligent realizes that allowing that type of sub licensing still wouldn't give him the right to forward those patent rights to the world.

[Ex-Cyber]

I would hope a man that intelligent realizes that allowing that type of sub licensing still wouldn't give him the right to forward those patent rights to the world.

I think that would depend on the text of the actual patent license. Perhaps Creative's lawyers really were too loose with the wording, but the lawyers said something like "it doesn't matter that you're right; they'll sue anyway, and we're not fighting that battle just so that you can be an internet hero". It would be interesting to know what actually happened, but I doubt it will come out anytime soon.

[yogi_berra]

Take your GPL hatred elsewhere troll, this has nothing to do with it. GPLv3 patent indemnification only says that if you release something you've patented under gplv3 you can't sue people for using it. The only way GPLv3 would be relevant to this discussion is if Creative had released source code with their patented technique under GPLv3.

Reread section 11 of the license, numnuts:

If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a patent license to some of the parties receiving the covered work authorizing them to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of the covered work, then the patent license you grant is automatically extended to all recipients of the covered work and works based on it.

[XorEaxEax]

If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a patent license to some of the parties receiving the covered work authorizing them to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of the covered work, then the patent license you grant is automatically extended to all recipients of the covered work and works based on it.

What the hell are you pointing at? It says that if you grant a patent licence (something you can ONLY DO IF YOU OWN THAT PATENT, which Id doesn't in this case) to some of the parties recieving the covered work then the patent licence you grant is extended to all recipients. In other words, this part of the licence you highlighted simply says that if you licence your patented code under GPLv3 then you can't just extend a patent grant to SOME of the recipients but instead you are allowing ALL recipients to use this patent.

But Id software CAN'T grant anyone use of this patent since they don't OWN the patent, so again GPLv3 has NOTHING to do with this. You trying to make this about GPLv3 is nothing but a symptom of your deperate hatred for GPL. Go troll somewhere else.