From: Linus T. <tor...@os...> - 2003-12-29 19:53:02
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On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Matt Sealey wrote: > > Ian: wouldn't it be possible to have an "official patch", for compressed > texture stuff, that tracks the trees & releases? I think that would be good, if somebody maintains it. It's pretty much guaranteed that anybody who has a modern graphics card has already been licensed for the patent, since the hw manufacturers would have done so already. So using the patch should be entirely legal, even if the DRI project may not want to worry about it. Especially a patch that only passes the compressed textures down to the hardware - it might make sense to not even have a software fallback. After all, the only people who care about this patch are game users, and those people likely do not want to see software fallbacks anyway. Once you do that, the software doesn't actually do anything that was patented. It's all in the hardware. Linus |