[Mesa-dev] Mesa & Mozilla regarding S3TC patent problem

[Tapani Pälli]

Hello;

On 08/29/2012 12:30 AM, Kenneth Graunke wrote:
> On 08/28/2012 10:56 AM, thibaut bethune wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> About the "the potential legal problem" regarding S3TC implementation
>> pointed, for instance, by Ian Romanick in Bug 24207 [1] , has anyone
>> noticed that Firefox 15 will support the WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc
>> extension [2] ?
>>
>> Does anyone know what is Mozilla's position regarding this situation ?
>>
>> Thanks !
>>
>> Thibaut, 35', France
>>
>> [1 ] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24207
>> [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Firefox_15_for_developers
> 
> As far as I know, WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc simply exposes the S3TC
> functionality already present in the underlying OpenGL drivers to web
> apps.  I don't think they can reasonably support it unless the GL
> drivers support S3TC.

Also the spec draft does not mention compression but only 'format
support' (decompression), for me it seems like
'WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc' is a composition of
EXT_texture_compression_dxt1 and ANGLE_texture_compression_dxt. This
might not help with the patent problem though (like dxt1 spec states).

http://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/extensions/WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc/


> The hardware and GL drivers, which actually implement the S3TC support,
> need an appropriate patent license.  Mozilla should not need a patent
> license: it's simply an application using S3TC (and there are tons of
> those), not implementing the texture compression algorithms.
> 
> So this does not really affect the patent situation in any way.
> 
> Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and cannot give legal advice.  This is
> purely my understanding.

-"-

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> 


-- 

// Tapani


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