On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, magenta wrote: > > > > By implementing S3TC without a patent license, the DRI team would be > > opening the DRI project up for potential litigation. > > On the other hand, by being too timid, the DRI team can also eventually > doom itself to obscurity. If everybody else supports S3TC, and popular > games (which accounts for about 99% of all the 3D market in the world > right now) need it - like DOOM III apparently will do - then at some point > the relevance of DRI becomes less. > > 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. > > Sw patents are bad. You can rant and rail against them all you want, but > as things stand now, a large portion of the badness is the _fear_ they > spread. I think allowing that fear to take over is just giving up entirely > on it.
In general, I completely agree with Linus on the above. One of my favorite quotes by Thomas Jefferson is something to the effect of, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is natural manure." I think if the DRI does proceed to implement it - I believe many vendors will probably remove that code before they ship their product - think RedHat and MP3 support in RedHat 8.0. It bothers me to do that, but in many ways it is understandable. You must pick your battles to fight wisely. -- //========================================================\\ || D. Hageman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> || \\========================================================// ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: Geek Gift Procrastinating? Get the perfect geek gift now! Before the Holidays pass you by. T H I N K G E E K . C O M http://www.thinkgeek.com/sf/ _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
