OpenWF Working Group Offers Hand To Wayland

[Ex-Cyber]

Replying to myself here, but wouldn't it be considered 'prior art' if they only file for a patent after a standard is already ratified? They would have to get the patent FIRST, and thus you have disclosure. So the WG has plenty of opportunity to strike down patented features before they go into a final document.

AFAIK, there is no such thing as "patented features", but rather "features that cannot be implemented without practicing a patent". It sounds like an academic distinction, but the point is that standards themselves typically specify requirements of a feature without specifying the specific techniques or algorithms used to implement them, and patents would cover the latter. So I would not expect that the standard alone is prior art (absent sample code or the like implementing the relevant feature(s)).

[liam]

Nope. EGL solves an entirely different problem.

EGL is basically a generalization of WGL/AGL/GLX, that is, it attempts to generalize context creation, to the extent that this is possible (it's not 100% possible, because e.g. on X11 you still need to know which Window you're creating the context for).

WF is an abstraction of layers like KMS and some of the other bits inside of DRI/Gallium3D that deal with getting the data in applications' windows onto the actual screen.

Very generally speaking: OpenGL hanldes the "draw this stuff to that framebuffer." EGL handles "attach this framebuffer to that window." WF handles "composite these windows onto that display."

Thanks for this.
I read the overview on khronos.org and it seemed like it was overlapping somewhat. Aside from what I read there was a diagram that placed egl between the hardware apis and owf. The later obviously makes more sense given what you've said.
I suppose what was confusing to me was that I knew egl to be a way to connect drawing contexts to parts of the display(indicating it knew of the display but still window level) while owf seemed to provide compositing and mode-setting/xrandr. It was the compositing that I thought egl was capable of(if nothing other than placing a window with an alpha channel).

[madjr]

hope this helps clean up a bit the linux graphical mess

[89c51]

hope this helps clean up a bit the linux graphical mess

it seems to create more options as far as i can understand it.

desktop toolkit --> wayland --> openwf (implemented over kms or by somekind of blob) or kernel API stuff

seems kind of duplication having openwf implemented (by kernel people) since we already have something to use with wayland

[mwendt]

A group setting standards like that should have the balls to create an organizational policy that forbids any sitting members of the Khronos working groups from enforcing a software patent on any part of a compliant implementation of the standards that Khronos releases, with a failure to comply resulting in the offending portions of the standard being struck from the standard in the next major API bump (or struck from the draft if they seek a patent before the standard is ratified). It's common sense.

The way the khronos group works is that a specification proposal is published to all members of a working group before it goes public. Members get 30 days to claim any patent infringements and if none are filed the specification is ratified. If no objections have been filed a patent holder that is part of the working group cannot file a claim against another khronos member for implementing the specification.

Extensions like S3TC is not in the core specification, so you can implement OpenGL without supporting it.

[locovaca]

Replying to myself here, but wouldn't it be considered 'prior art' if they only file for a patent after a standard is already ratified? They would have to get the patent FIRST, and thus you have disclosure. So the WG has plenty of opportunity to strike down patented features before they go into a final document.

This sounds a lot like what RAMBUS did with JEDEC and RAMBUS eventually won out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Lawsuits