Queries regarding the Khronos specification license

[Faith Ekstrand]

What do you mean "re-implementing parts of the Vulkan APIs"?

I have a feeling someone is confused about licensing....

Also, I'm NOT a lawyer. What follows does not constitute legal advice and
anyone who's actually concerned about the legal implications should consult
an actual lawyer who is familiar with international copyright law.

Okay, with that said, I don't think anyone in the OpenBSD world has
anything to worry about. The only thing being distributed under Apache 2.0
are the Vulkan headers, not any of the driver code implementing Vulkan. If
someone is that worried about the license of a handful of headers, I think
they should just go through the OpenBSD approval process and get them
approved.  I guess you'll have to also get the loader approved but I doubt
there's any real problems there, either.

A for Khronos copyright. Yes, we should be good there. Most Vulkan drivers
in Mesa are conformant implementations and therefore it's fine to use the
Vulkan trademark in association with them.

If you're talking about making a different spec that looks like Vulkan and
uses different names for everything just to avoid the Apache 2.0 license,
don't do that. That will get you in trouble with Khronos and I will NAK any
attempt to do that in Mesa.

Again, I'm not a lawyer.

~Faith

On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 11:52 AM Paianis <mail at paianis.name> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> For context, I'm interested in re-implementing parts of the Vulkan APIs
> (at least the parts necessary to develop a Wayland compositor), as the
> OpenBSD project won't accept Apache License 2.0 for code except when it
> is deemed unavoidable (LLVM), and the Khronos' APIs use this license.
>
> The Khronos specifications for Vulkan and later OpenGL versions use this
> license:
>
>
> https://www.khronos.org/legal/Khronos_Specification_Copyright_License_Header
>
> Have Mesa3D developers had to use the specifications under
> registry.khronos.org for other Khronos standards, and if so, has written
> permission to use them and Khronos trademarks ever been sought?
>
> If I've understood correctly, Mesa3D currently has Vulkan drivers for
> some GPUs in various stages of progress, but not a re-implementation of
> the Vulkan APIs. Would it be an acceptable home for this (under the MIT
> License), or should such a project be separate for now?
>
> Thanks
>
> Paianis
>
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