Will Floating Point Textures Be Merged Into Mesa?

[Ragas]

Terminal bdsm ftw!

Terminal godness!

But if you don't like it you can get rid of the terminal after the first installation. (there are graphical tools for everything)

[Ragas]

And I want those Mesa patches in Mainline.

I frankly don't care much about the patent situation in the USA.
But I do care about features in Mesa.

[plonoma]

When do these patents expire?

Anybody cares to tell this not so little detail?

It's not even mentioned in the article.

[Nille]

Currently only Eric Anholt (he is for the merge) has replayed to this discussion. I bet this discussion is dead for the next 6 month.

[smitty3268]

When do these patents expire?

Anybody cares to tell this not so little detail?

It's not even mentioned in the article.

I think it's 2020 or so. Quite a while. And I'm also pretty sure these patents are registered in Europe, so everyone who thinks this is a US only problem is wrong. I know some of the opengl patents are registered there anyway, if these aren't.

[smitty3268]

Oh, and merely distributing code that implements patented features shouldn't cause any legal problems.

Look at x264 for example. That code is highly patented, and the patent owners are highly litigious. They just tell people that if you are going to use it, get a license, and that works fine for everyone.

[RealNC]

The nice thing about law is that anyone who has more money than you can sue you, and even win the lawsuit, even if the law is actually on your side.

So just because it would be lawful to include that code in source form, you can still get sued and lose if the one doing the suing is richer than you.

[smitty3268]

The nice thing about law is that anyone who has more money than you can sue you, and even win the lawsuit, even if the law is actually on your side.

So just because it would be lawful to include that code in source form, you can still get sued and lose if the one doing the suing is richer than you.

The code is already out there and hosted on the same server. If someone wanted to sue them, they already could. I guess integrating it back into the master branch might raise it's profile a bit and draw attention, but from a legal POV there's not much reason to leave it out. IANAL

[drag]

It really depends what the patents are for.

Don't think that you can look at the patents for s3tc and then understand how patents for other parts of OpenGL work. That is not how the patent system works.

For example...

It can be perfectly legal to write code, and then use the compiled code, but be illegal to compile the code.

Don't try to make sense of any of it. It does not make sense. It's completely arbitrary.

That is why software patents are so f*ked.

[slojam]

OMG.. someone got a patent for floating point textures?!? Sooooo wrong. Software patents need to be done away with.

....somewhere within the research division of a large American tech company....
Smith: "Hey lets patent 2 dimensional wchar_t arrays!!"
Shandrakar: "We'll be rich!! ...well maybe they will raise us above $30/hr."
Smith: "At the least we could use it to scare the open source community."
Shandrakar: "And we can put *patent* on our resumes!"
Smith: "excellent!"

Oh well, its good that the patches will be merged into Mesa mainline.