Patents May Cause Issues For OpenGL 3 In Mesa

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Patents May Cause Issues For OpenGL 3 In Mesa

While work on OpenGL 3.x support in Mesa has been very slow, many have been looking forward to the day when Gallium3D hardware drivers provide fast acceleration and a OpenGL 3 state tracker to provide this support to all Gallium3D users. Intel though has also been wanting to bring some OpenGL 3 support to the classic Mesa stack...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzU3Nw

[benmoran]

Well I suppose Ian has the right idea... As an American i'm pissed off at the whole software patent thing, and even more disgusted that we're trying to push other countries into adopting them.

[JeanPaul145]

I'm reeeeeeeaaaally temped to say "implement the code, release it in Europe, and let the Americans stew in their own patent-juices".
Now I won't do that because I know that the people hit in this case are mostly not proponents of US software patents.

But this patent mumbo-jumbo is some grade-A bullcrap.:mad:

[dungeon]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24207
There already is such an extension. See:

http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/texture_compression_dxt1.txt

However, supporting this outright still does not resolve the potential legal
problem. Furthermore, we still have to be able to support potential software
fallbacks. We can't do that without a way to handle compressed textures in
software. Without a license for S3TC, we're not going to add any further
support for S3TC textures.

Sorry.

Fuck off Ian! There is a free continent out there!

[snogglethorpe]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24207

Fuck off Ian! There is a free continent out there!

I don't think there are very many OpenGL users in Antarctica...

[VinzC]

Patents and OpenGL? WTF? Is that a joke?

[dungeon]

@snogglethorpe
One is enough if his name is Tux:rolleyes:.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/Tux.png/180px-Tux.png

[Ex-Cyber]

Patents and OpenGL? WTF? Is that a joke?When an industry association/consortium/whatever calls a standard "open" they don't mean it in the same sense as "open source". Some organizations have stricter standards for "openness", but the lowest common denominator is pretty much just that any company is allowed to base a product on it if they pay the standardized licensing fees and adhere to the standard (i.e. there's no required negotiation or approval process beyond compliance testing).

[bugmenot]

http://stopsoftwarepatents.eu/

software patents are crap. :(

[mirza]

#ifndef I_AM_IN_USA_AND_FEEL_LOYAL_TO_US_PATENT_LAWS
...
#endif

[numasan]

I feel sick...

[nanonyme]

Thank you for existing USA. <3
Edit: Naw, it's a fine country, just a bit messed up legislation.

[Apopas]

Disgusting, stupid, idiot, unexchusable, officious software patents. And when I think that there are people who support this kind of establishment , makes me sick. :mad:

[MostAwesomeDude]

I am not a lawyer.

We will be adding compile-time flags to Mesa for several features over the next few weeks. It will be up to distros and individual users to decide which features they would like to build into their Mesas. Some features will be enabled by default, some will not.

We are not helpless; we do have a plan.

[L33F3R]

im going to be the oddball out.

Isnt OGG patented?

And im glad you guys have a plan :)

[nanonyme]

Isnt OGG patented?The difference between there being a patent and there being a patent that you have to pay royalties to use it is about the same as between being threatened with a sword and having one junked into your gut.

[MostAwesomeDude]

im going to be the oddball out.

Isnt OGG patented?

And im glad you guys have a plan :)

Ogg is not patented.

Vorbis is not patented; some companies have claimed to hold patents against it, but Xiph is confident that it is legally okay to develop and distribute Vorbis.

Theora is patented, but the patents are all well-known and have been released under a very liberal license, effectively making Theora as free as, if not freer than, Vorbis.

S3TC is patented.

[Apopas]

im going to be the oddball out.

Isnt OGG patented?

And im glad you guys have a plan :)
As you can see in their main page http://www.vorbis.com/
Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.


Also, from wikipedia:
Patent retaliation

"Patent retaliation" clauses are included in several free software licences. The goal of these clauses is to create a penalty so as to discourage the licensee (the user/recipient of the software) from suing the licensor (the provider/author of the software) for patent infringement by terminating the licence upon the initiation of such a lawsuit.

The Free Software Foundation included a narrow patent retaliation clause in drafts 1 and 2 of version 3 of the GPL, however, this clause was removed in draft 3 as its enforceability and effectiveness was decided to be too dubious to be worth the added complexity.[14]

Examples of broader clauses are those of the Apache License and the Mozilla Public License.

[b4283]

god d*mn all patents, really.

[Ant P.]

My opinion has always been "screw 'em, they can't sue us all".

Whose fault are these patents, and do they have any products we can boycott?

[Apopas]

My opinion has always been "screw 'em, they can't sue us all".

Whose fault are these patents, and do they have any products we can boycott?

Boycott window$, mp3, h264, doc, aac, wma, wmv, flash and macosx for the begining...

[NomadDemon]

patents suck hard... i hate them....

[L33F3R]

Ogg is not patented.

Vorbis is not patented; some companies have claimed to hold patents against it, but Xiph is confident that it is legally okay to develop and distribute Vorbis.

Theora is patented, but the patents are all well-known and have been released under a very liberal license, effectively making Theora as free as, if not freer than, Vorbis.

S3TC is patented.

i was under the impression that it was a patented format, for the purpose that free use could not be contested.

[yoshi314]

It will be up to distros and individual users to decide which features they would like to build into their Mesas. Some features will be enabled by default, some will not.that means that some patent-aware distros (e.g. fedora) will roll out crippled mesa by default. (yay for gentoo - users will be able to choose it at build-time).

i wonder how is canonical going to explain this to ubuntu users? yet another patent warning some of them will have to click through :/

[V!NCENT]

Why does Linux have to support OpenGL3? Why can't we do the same thing like Wine does (DirectX10->OpenGL2, same graphics)? Just have a OpenGL3 to OpenGL2 parser? What will the performance penalty be like? How old are the patents? In other words how long would this translator have to last?

PS: Wait a minute... floating textures... Is OpenCL in danger?

[MostAwesomeDude]

Please be less dense, gentlmen; I cannot offer legal advice and I am trying quite hard to describe the situation without saying something wrong or stupid.

Boycott window$, mp3, h264, doc, aac, wma, wmv, flash and macosx for the begining...

S3 holds the S3TC patents. You already boycott them just by not knowing about their products. Microsoft has the ability to sub-license S3TC with their DXTC technology; you cannot avoid this fee, as it is included in the cost of every video card you have ever purchased.

SGI holds floating-point texture and framebuffer patents. Like S3, you don't actually buy anything they make.

If you're feeling proactive, you could attempt to boycott Sorenson, holder of h.264, by refusing to buy anything with h.264 abilities, or Apple, with whom they are deeply linked. Again, this ability is in most discrete video cards, so a boycott will not work.

i was under the impression that it was a patented format, for the purpose that free use could not be contested.

You are confusing copyrights and patents. Patents have no concept of free use.

Why does Linux have to support OpenGL3? Why can't we do the same thing like Wine does (DirectX10->OpenGL2, same graphics)? Just have a OpenGL3 to OpenGL2 parser? What will the performance penalty be like? How old are the patents? In other words how long would this translator have to last?

PS: Wait a minute... floating textures... Is OpenCL in danger?

I am not a lawyer.

An OpenGL 3.x stack would need to implement floating-point renderbuffers. Translation layers are not magically exempt; you seem to be under the impression that Wine's actions are expressly for legal reasons. (Microsoft probably does not have any legal recourse against implementations of DirectX that it has not authorized, for the same reason that it cannot prevent implementations of Win32 API from existing.)

OpenCL stacks may be exposed to the same issues as OpenGL 3.x stacks.

[drag]

There is precedence for S3TC.

http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/dri_experimental/s3tc_index.html

If Mesa can implement as much as OpenGL 3 as possible and use workarounds for patented features, even if they are not 100% compatible, then allow users to add a library file to get the patented features then I expect that would be acceptable work around.

The most important thing is that you retain API compatibility with applications. Even if it's slow or ugly it does not really matter a whole lot.. just as long as it can run without crashing.

[nanonyme]

There is precedence for S3TC.

http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/dri_experimental/s3tc_index.htmlCan you actually read the page? ;) "Depending on where you live, you might need a valid license for s3tc in order to be legally allowed to use the external library." That is no precedent, the author just says that if the user happens to violate patents, the author can't be sued. Also the author left the project and quit.

[hubick]

We will be adding compile-time flags to Mesa for several features over the next few weeks.

For the OGG lovin Freetards like me who don't want any proprietary crap, can you elaborate on what impact the lack of said features will have on my desktop? Is it safe to assume we are just talking about losing a chunk of performance here, and that major features like Gallium3D, Clutter, and all that stuff will still work?

[Ranguvar]

Good god...
Software patents: not now, not ever.

ESPECIALLY not now, when the 3D GNU/Linux desktop is rapidly being reworked.
Here's hoping the Mesa devs (and any distros that enable patented features) are not sued.

Nothing like a good patent minefield to slow progress >.>

[chipsugar]

Yet again the rest of the world has to make concessions to US patent law.

Boo sucks.

[MostAwesomeDude]

For the OGG lovin Freetards like me who don't want any proprietary crap, can you elaborate on what impact the lack of said features will have on my desktop? Is it safe to assume we are just talking about losing a chunk of performance here, and that major features like Gallium3D, Clutter, and all that stuff will still work?

S3TC's been iffy for a while. Floating-point textures are required for certain computational apps.

You lose a couple esoteric features. No performance loss; these features are largely for improving rendering quality, sometimes at the cost of speed (floating-point buffers are four times the size of normal 32-bit buffers.)

[hubick]

I'm getting sick and tired of all the useless and immature complaining about software patents. Yes, they totally suck, we have all known this for quite some time now. But they exist, and don't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon - you can't just ignore them or stick your head in the sand and hope they go away. We don't need another SCO situation but where this time Evil Co. comes up with the patent goods to back up their lawsuit, and is awarded an order for Canonical/RedHat to stop shipping Linux, they spread more FUD, etc, etc. So, given that situation, how should the community deal with the situation within the confines of the law? This is why MESA is (smartly) adding compile time flags, and why Free formats like OGG were created, great. I would just like to see a more serious impact assessment - what needs to be worked around, and what problems will this actually cause us. Any?

[hubick]

S3TC's been iffy for a while. Floating-point textures are required for certain computational apps.

You lose a couple esoteric features. No performance loss; these features are largely for improving rendering quality, sometimes at the cost of speed (floating-point buffers are four times the size of normal 32-bit buffers.)

Thank you very much for letting us know what the actual situation here is. It sounds like we don't have too too much to worry about then.

[Eosie]

I guess almost every today's game out there requires floating-point textures (e.g. for advanced shadow mapping and HDR postprocessing), so do not expect them to run or be watchable. Then put S3TC out, which might increase your videomemory consumption up to 8x (the compression ratio of DXT1), and you can really forget about doing some serious computer graphics with open source drivers. Thank god I don't live in US and never will.

Most of the other GL3.x functionality can be exposed through extensions, except the ClearBuffer API.

OpenCL stacks may be exposed to the same issues as OpenGL 3.x stacks.
Does this mean that OpenCL will be disabled by default in most distros?

[MostAwesomeDude]

Look at it this way. Patents haven't prevented anybody determined from getting patented audio or video support.

If you'd like to continue panicking and raging and running around like beheaded poultry, you can of course do so to your heart's content.

[L33F3R]

If you'd like to continue panicking and raging and running around like beheaded poultry, you can of course do so to your heart's content.

ahaha i love that, epic sentence. The man needs a beer for that 1. :D

Beheaded poultry XD.

[Svartalf]

Thank you very much for letting us know what the actual situation here is. It sounds like we don't have too too much to worry about then.

Actually...the problem lies in getting studios to sign off on something less than this stuff. They WANT this sort of stuff because it makes it easier to do their "art" with "less effort". Not that I blame them, mind- but trying to get games on Linux, well, it'll be a smidge harder to sell people on it if we don't have OGL 3.0 or ES 2.0 in hand in their entirety in a form that many, if not most, can use largely out of box with.

S3TC is a problem.
Lack of having the "good" render targets is a problem.

The thing that concerns me is that we're getting told that a data structure (that's all a render target is within the API) is covered by patent(s). S3TC is "covered" in the sense of not easily or readily being able to use it- not because of the data, but because you need to use the algorithm that IS patented to provide these textures. Now, you can merely provide the compressed textures directly to the card, but since you have to be able to support providing a raw texture and then compressing it to the specified compressed format, they opt (and rightly so) to not support any aspect of it currently (though it sounds like that's changing... :D). I find it disturbing that they're having to side-step floating point rendering/texture targets for "patent reasons".

To the best of my knowlege, no algorithms needed. Just a data structure to pull from or put into since it's NOT compressed.

[cb88]

Um shouldn't it be that the hardware implementation of floating point compression is patented?

I mean you can reimplement that same compression with different hardware at least that is how patents are supposed to work. Afaik basic computer components are not patentable although archetecutral designs are. ie MIPS ARM ALPHA x86 etc... patents on registers or and gates would just be stupid specific kinds of and gates and registers however are patentable I suppose

Patents are to protect the exact method for doing something not every method for doing it under teh sun

When did all this stuff get stupid (when money came into the picture I suppose) its like saying you own a copyright on hardback books or something.

Perhaps the S3TC texture compression could be fought on the basis that it is the defacto standard for floating point compression? Or that any proprietary implementation can't be stolen and used but can be reimplemented in a different way.

[Eosie]

Look at it this way. Patents haven't prevented anybody determined from getting patented audio or video support.
That's nice, but patents are actually preventing everybody from getting S3TC in Mesa, regardless of the country. Hopefully this one will change soon...

If you'd like to continue panicking
I was just saying back there what is obvious to a 3D graphics application developer. Not gonna continue from there.

[snogglethorpe]

The thing that concerns me is that we're getting told that a data structure (that's all a render target is within the API) is covered by patent(s).

Indeed. Specialized compressed texture formats at least probably embody some cleverness, which may conceivably be eligible for a patent, but completely obvious and straight-forward extensions of older concepts like floating-point textures or render targets should not be patentable, regardless of whether you support software patents or not.

If they indeed are patented, it seems likely to be due to the usual cluelessness on the part of the patent office when it comes to software issues, and so should be a good candidate for being overturned.

[There should really be a penalties against the patent examiner granting sufficiently idiotic patents -- and against the applicant for requesting them. The only way this crap will stop is if there's some reason for them to care...]

[Yfrwlf]

My opinion has always been "screw 'em, they can't sue us all".

Whose fault are these patents, and do they have any products we can boycott?

Fully agreed. Basically, laws that are not by the majority are BS, everyone knows that companies are the only ones pushing these and that the U.S. is controlled by corporate interests. Possibly the best way the public can rebel against BS like this when the government doesn't want to listen to them is by ignoring the law.

Fight against patents by treading on them, IMO. That's the only way to get the issue noticed, is when some company tries throwing a fit over it.

Sure, several OSS-related companies don't want to be the ones to stand up against patents, but it has to happen sometime and someone has to do it.

[drag]

You guys are delusional.

No company wants to go up and fight software patents all the way to the supreme court.

Why? Becuase there is a decent chance that the supreme court will upheld the software patent and we would be stuck with it for centuries!!

[Yfrwlf]

You guys are delusional.

No company wants to go up and fight software patents all the way to the supreme court.

Why? Becuase there is a decent chance that the supreme court will upheld the software patent and we would be stuck with it for centuries!!

Laws are created by citizens and with enough force common sense can eventually get pushed through. It's not like the Supreme Court are a bunch of gods or something.

Regardless, the key is you can't stop the sharing of information and collaboration, so patents, copyrights, and all other forms of attempts to block idea sharing will always fail. It's only a matter of the corporations finally being put in their places after enough resistance takes place.

[V!NCENT]

Let's all calm down...

First step: Identify the actual patents
Would Mesa actually be infringing patents if it was to follow the OpenGL3 reference?

Next step: If mesa would be infringing, can we work around it?
Is this going to hurt performance? If so is this acceptable yes or no?

Third step: Do what must be done
Contact the FSF.

[krazy]

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/10/red-hat-bilski-brief-says-software-patents-stifle-innovation.ars

Go Red Hat! Hopefully, the many examples of stifled innovation will see some kind of reforms pushed through..

[Ranguvar]

You guys are delusional.

No company wants to go up and fight software patents all the way to the supreme court.

Why? Becuase there is a decent chance that the supreme court will upheld the software patent and we would be stuck with it for centuries!!

LOL... see the last poster's link... such epic timing.

And that statement is completely false. See the LWN comments: http://lwn.net/Articles/355244/

[nhaehnle]

The thing that concerns me is that we're getting told that a data structure (that's all a render target is within the API) is covered by patent(s).
Totally agree.

Even if you're a friend of software patents, what is there to patent about floating-point framebuffers? Floating-point is well known, framebuffers, are well-known, all you're doing is exchanging one type for another. There is simply no invention there and there should therefore not be a valid patent.

[nanonyme]

Laws are created by citizens and with enough force common sense can eventually get pushed through. It's not like the Supreme Court are a bunch of gods or something.They pretty much are unless the majority of the population are holding them at a gunpoint as part of a revolution. ;)

[yogi_berra]

Laws are created by citizens and with enough force common sense can eventually get pushed through.

In theory this is correct, the reality is that the current situation with patents in the US didn't go through Congress and was not created by citizens or the courts.

The situation was created by the Patent Office issuing of a broad statement that allowed for everything short of a human being to be patented after a lengthy legal battle over the patentability of lab mice used in cancer research.

btw - the FSF is an ineffectual lobbying agent, you will get better results by contacting your elected officials directly about reforming _all_ of patent law than allowing a minor non-profit to speak for you on the sole basis of software patents.

[illissius]

S3 holds the S3TC patents. You already boycott them just by not knowing about their products. Microsoft has the ability to sub-license S3TC with their DXTC technology; you cannot avoid this fee, as it is included in the cost of every video card you have ever purchased.

SGI holds floating-point texture and framebuffer patents. Like S3, you don't actually buy anything they make.

If you're feeling proactive, you could attempt to boycott Sorenson, holder of h.264, by refusing to buy anything with h.264 abilities, or Apple, with whom they are deeply linked. Again, this ability is in most discrete video cards, so a boycott will not work.

I senses a pattern! Let's just boycott every company beginning with the letter S. That'll teach them!