S3 texture compression patent

[Lionel Ulmer]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 11:47:04AM -0400, Vincent Béron wrote:
> Le ven 17/10/2003 à 11:24, Jonathan Wilson a écrit :
> > What specificly does this patent cover and what parts of WINE would it affect?
> > (i.e. which bits of windows, if implemented in WINE, would fall under the 
> > patent?)
> 
> Probably not much, since (IANAL) it'd be the GL driver doing the actual
> work. That's why NVIDIA's have it, but Mesa or the open-source ATI
> doesn't.

The big problem with this patent is that, well, nobody really knows much
about what exactly is allowed or what is not (and this causes also some
problem to the DRI people).

Anyway, in the Wine code, if the GL driver supports compressed texture via
S3TC, then Wine will not violate any patent by just passing the data from
the application to the driver.

The big question is when the card does not support it and we need to do the
decompression in software and send it back to the card.... In this case, do
we violate it or not ?

         Lionel

-- 
		 Lionel Ulmer - http://www.bbrox.org/