An OpenGL 4.1 Gallium3D State Tracker Was Just Proposed

[Awesomeness]

FAIL!

(who pays the bills while spending time on this task? Developing a state tracker beside the job...? ha ha)

GSOC money is not paid on a monthly basis. It is only judged after GSOC whether it was a success or not and gets money. So he needs to have a regular job anyway.
And even if GSOC paid monthly: Who would quit his job for a few months for this anyway?

KWin's main developer manages to develop everything as part of his hobby. He is not paid by anyone for his work. He has a regular job in a completely unrelated company.

[Rabauke]

I don't get your point. The more money involved, the more oss advances. May it be in LoC or in quality. So this money is an incentive to get things done earlier.

It should be free of choice whether a person who is willing to code (that you can use free of charge btw.) takes money for it or not. In the end it's only about having now or having in the next five years. And as you can see, there are people out there who want to get specific parts earlier.

And the GoSC money is available anyway. So don't mind.

[allquixotic]

Does anything, besides future kde versions , actually use OpenGL 4+ on Linux?

Personally I couldn't care less about OpenGL 4, 5, 10 whatever. All I care about is good OpenGL 2.1 support plus any extras needed by wine. And by good support I'm talking about support in the complete driver stack, not just the state tracker. So from my point of view I'd rather see a GSoC student applying for hacking on r600g.

Having said that, it's not for me to decide what other people should do in their own time, so if he wishes to work on OpenGL 4.1 I wish him good luck, although I agree with other comments that it does sound way too over ambitious.

AFAIK, Kwin is only going to use ClosedGL 3.x, not 4.x.. but that's close enough, since 3.x was a massive change in its own right.

And don't forget Unigine games, which for now is just the failure OilRush, but will soon be a lot more (the free licenses they gave away, plus any commercial licenses they've sold to date).

I agree, however, that full and efficient (read: comparable to binary alternatives) OpenGL 2.1 support for all Gallium3d drivers is far more important in 2011-2012 than any higher version of ClosedGL support. I'd even place EGL and GLES 2.0 at a higher priority than ClosedGL 3.x or later -- especially if proper support would be excluded by default from the most popular distros due to patent issues.

I hate software patents, and Khronos for allowing them to seep into their "Open" GL specification, and the 1 minute edit limit.

[baryluk]

Absolutely possible with good and passionate developer. Good luck.

[przemoli]

Kwin will support OpenGL ES 2.0, but not OGL 3.x....

As for patents?

1) Servers developers must live outside USA (or provide code with disabled by default patents)
2) Distro vendors MUST by placed outside USA, and must/should warn that software may infidge some laws of some countries.
3) Patents must cover software and hardware issues. (S3TC covers only hwd so LLVMPipe will have it enebled by default).

EU do not have software patents. But USA is activelly pushing for them.

[jakubo]

Getting into FOSS just for the money… boy, I hate GSOC. It has corrupted the whole FOSS community.
Either he wants to develop that, then he should do it right now and not “maybe in summer if I get accepted”.

i dont think its fair. without sponsors linux would be merely a hobby.

[marek]

S3TC covers only hwd so LLVMPipe will have it enebled by default

This is not true.

[V!NCENT]

Belgium has AFAIK also no USA laws

(1 min edit indeed sucks)

QFT. This reminds me of the game Killzone 3:

This is not human! This is against the Stockholm international treaty!
-What fscking planet do you think you're on?!

Stereotypical USA behavior; thinking you are the entire world....

[cb88]

Since marek didn't' elaborate... from what I've gathered. S3TC is used for compressing uncompressed textures to send to the card and also to process such textures when already compressed and there is no hardware support. If the texture is already compressed and hardware is being used S3TC isn't needed as the texture can be passed straight to the card.

P.S. if Michael knew what was good for him he would reenable editing so we could correct mistakes in posts so they don't spread misinformation... as its stands this is one of the worst forums I have ever been on.

[JeanPaul145]

... OpenGL 3/4 linux implementation is stopped by those f***ed patents.
Will be ever possible to do something GL3/4 without having to pay someone $ 1,241,452,883,945,814,664,741,093 for every single working OpenGL thing + 3,121,532 years in prison on Pluto (years of Pluto, not Earth)?

Sure it's possible. Do all your work in the European Union. They don't have the retarded concept of software patents.