Mesa Developers Still Fear Patent Wrath With S2TC

[hal2k1]

No, you cannot

For instance you cannot purchase an Ipad and then announce a contest:

"Winner gets a free ipad"

Without Apple's permission, because you cannot use their trademarked name in a commercial context without their permission (actual court case).

For instance, If you purchase each of the components of a patented device, you cannot then assemble them into the patented device and sell it.

For instance, If you purchase a book in a country without copyright laws, you cannot legally sell the book in a country with copyright laws.

There are many more instances but I have to get back to work.

These are all instances of your trying to make further commercial transactions with an item after you purchased that item.

My meaning was in relation to your own property. Once you have purchased an item it becomes your property, and you can do with it what you want in the context of it being your property. You have an implied license to use the item, for your personal use, in the context of it being your property, however you want. This does not necessarily extend to re-sale of the item because it would no longer be your property after the resale. You should not be able to enjoy profit from a re-sale derived from the advertising expenditures of the original manufacturer, for example. Even there there is the concept of "first sale" where a lot of the IP rights of the original maker of an item expire after the first sale of that item.

As far as an end user of a graphics card using IP embedded in that card, none of this discussion applies. The end user clearly has an implied license to whatever IP is embedded in the card, and any original patent holders have absolutely no right to try to restrict what software an end user runs to use that card, which is now the end user's legal property.

[PsynoKhi0]

I'm certain that a couple of years ago, Microsoft went out and officially said that they "will never sue over C# or CLI". *google google*

Here we go:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jul-06.html

So they have officially (by positive statement I assume) said that it is:
"It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions. "

So mono shouldn't be a problem anymore. Not since 2009. They even end their statement with:
Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.

Oh I know that link very well... I refer often to it for this particular piece:

Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct.

In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.

I boggles my mind that this gets brushed over.

[divVerent]

We could simplify the issue...

basically, GPUs have a "switch" that activates the patented method (S3TC decompression).

S2TC does not evade THAT part - it could, though, if S2TC decompression were implemented not using that circuit, but by decoding in a shader.

Now the GPU vendors only licensed the "switch" under the condition that "our drivers push it". When someone else writes a driver that pushes the "switch", the license is no longer fulfilled, and a patent violation happens.

RL analogy:

Basically: we have a box. The box has a switch. Only authorized HTC personnel (or others who have a license to push that switch, like AMD) may use it. Anyone else who uses that switch - EVEN IF HE OWNS THE BOX - may not do so, because he's not authorized by HTC. EVEN if it doesn't matter to him that the switch activates something covered by a patent, and he just wants to hang clothes off it! And this is enforced by patents.

I should start building such boxes, with a big DO NOT PUSH button, which does exactly nothing in a somewhat impressive way. Then I file a patent on this "doing nothing in a somewhat impressive way" method - and voila, I can start selling the boxes, and suing anyone who got curious enough to push the button. Sounds like a nice revenue model...

[oibaf]

S2TC is in Debian and Ubuntu now:
http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/s2tc
http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/precise/s2tc

Bug to add a Recommends on s2tc in mesa:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668645
https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+s...sa/+bug/823062

[Thatguy]

These are all instances of your trying to make further commercial transactions with an item after you purchased that item.

My meaning was in relation to your own property. Once you have purchased an item it becomes your property, and you can do with it what you want in the context of it being your property. You have an implied license to use the item, for your personal use, in the context of it being your property, however you want. This does not necessarily extend to re-sale of the item because it would no longer be your property after the resale. You should not be able to enjoy profit from a re-sale derived from the advertising expenditures of the original manufacturer, for example. Even there there is the concept of "first sale" where a lot of the IP rights of the original maker of an item expire after the first sale of that item.

As far as an end user of a graphics card using IP embedded in that card, none of this discussion applies. The end user clearly has an implied license to whatever IP is embedded in the card, and any original patent holders have absolutely no right to try to restrict what software an end user runs to use that card, which is now the end user's legal property.

There is a way to royally fuck these patent trolls, pm me if your interested, it'd require of course more patents however, but you'd have them by the balls. All of them.