Nicholas Leippe wrote:
On Wednesday 18 December 2002 11:20 pm, you wrote:Bettr still. A loadable part of Mesa/ drivers. Have a simple default module that does nothing/ returns an error if S3TC (de)compression is requested. Then someone, out of reach of the patent, can write a version of the module that works. A single C file should work, built against the DRI/XF86/Mesa headers, and it replaces the default version. If at some later date S3/VIA decide we can use it, the infastructure is there. If needed for speed, the code could then be builtin instead of a module. Add in the hooks for a loadable module, is simply preparing for quick implementation when S3/VIA give the go ahead.
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 wayMaybe the proper course of action would be to try to come up with a
too much so. Is the answer to just cower in a hole and hope it passes?
Maybe. And maybe not.
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.
-Thomas
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