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

[Kenneth Graunke]

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.

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.