Re: [AD] WIP compressed texture support patch

[allefant <allefant@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Wikipedia says a patent infringement means that you use "one or more" of the claims listed in the patent. So what we'd have to check is if any of the claims is about the ordering. if all claims are about compression/decompression (and the layout is just described outside of the claims) we should be fine.

On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 5:53 AM, SiegeLordEx <slabode@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 12/09/2014 08:35 PM, SiegeLordEx wrote:
> On 12/09/2014 02:33 PM, Trent Gamblin wrote:
>> Does the OpenGL flipping thing in any way potentially cause patent
>> issues? I
>> notice it's almost decoding and re-encoding rows, but I'm no expert.
>
> Yeah, I am a little worried about that. The code is not doing any
> compression/decompression, but merely taking advantage of the memory
> layout of the blocks. Some of these layouts are the same as those used
> by formats which are not patent encumbered (e.g. consider RGTC which
> uses the same format as the alpha block of DXT5). Mesa implements RGTC,
> so it must be fine by them.

I looked a little more into this, and I think we're almost certainly in
the clear. To infringe on a patent, you need to implement all of its
claims. Since a few of the claims of the S3TC patent are explicitly
about compression/decompression (which we don't do), I don't think we
are anywhere close to infringing.

-SL

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