From: Nicholas L. <ni...@by...> - 2002-12-19 08:15:41
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On Wednesday 18 December 2002 11:20 pm, you wrote: > On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 08:10:30PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > > You have to balance things out. Yes, the US is litiginous, and clearly way > > too much so. Is the answer to just cower in a hole and hope it passes? > > Maybe. And maybe not. > > Maybe the proper course of action would be to try to come up with a > workalike mechanism which doesn't infringe on the patent. For example, > using an approximation of the actual algorithm. I seem to recall that the > S3TC algorithm is basically a simple "store every corner of an NxN square > at full precision and store the gradients at a lower precision" > algorithm... > > Also, what about doing hardware-only support, and just breaking for > software fallback? Then it'd be up to the hardware (which ostensibly has a > license) to implement the algorithm. What about just implementing it as a patch hosted outside the U.S.? Leave the choice up to the users just like with decss. |