Re: [Mesa3d-dev] Status of s3tc patent in respect to open-source drivers and workarounds

[Luca B. <luc...@gm...>]

I just noticed a potentially interesting thing.

nVidia publishes under the MIT license a software suite called "nVidia
texture tools".
This includes a library called "nvtt" that provides DXT* compression,
plus a library called "nvimage" that provides decompression.
It looks like the libraries can be used unmodified and nVidia is
almost surely a licensee of that patent.

So, if using and shipping a possibly-patent-covered library published
by a patent licensee does not risk violating the patent, we may have a
workable solution.