https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38274
--- Comment #17 from Stefan Dösinger stefan@codeweavers.com --- We "view" the image when running a game by passing it to OpenGL and let the driver developers (Nvidia, AMD) bother about the legal stuff. In case of Mesa OpenGL passes that to the user in the sense of "Install this library. It's your responsibility now to care for the patent, not ours."
In theory we could also use OpenGL to compress and decompress the textures without rendering it, but the API architecture, and in particular the requirement to create an OpenGL context to do that, makes this difficult.
Still, I don't think our ability to create or decompress s3tc textures breaks your game. It most likely breaks dxtex though.