What specificly does this patent cover and what parts of WINE would it affect? (i.e. which bits of windows, if implemented in WINE, would fall under the patent?)
Le ven 17/10/2003 à 11:24, Jonathan Wilson a écrit :
What specificly does this patent cover and what parts of WINE would it affect? (i.e. which bits of windows, if implemented in WINE, would fall under the patent?)
Probably not much, since (IANAL) it'd be the GL driver doing the actual work. That's why NVIDIA's have it, but Mesa or the open-source ATI doesn't.
Vincent
On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 11:47:04AM -0400, Vincent Béron wrote:
Le ven 17/10/2003 à 11:24, Jonathan Wilson a écrit :
What specificly does this patent cover and what parts of WINE would it affect? (i.e. which bits of windows, if implemented in WINE, would fall under the patent?)
Probably not much, since (IANAL) it'd be the GL driver doing the actual work. That's why NVIDIA's have it, but Mesa or the open-source ATI doesn't.
The big problem with this patent is that, well, nobody really knows much about what exactly is allowed or what is not (and this causes also some problem to the DRI people).
Anyway, in the Wine code, if the GL driver supports compressed texture via S3TC, then Wine will not violate any patent by just passing the data from the application to the driver.
The big question is when the card does not support it and we need to do the decompression in software and send it back to the card.... In this case, do we violate it or not ?
Lionel
On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 18:58:42 +0200, Lionel Ulmer lionel.ulmer@free.fr wrote:
The big question is when the card does not support it and we need to do the decompression in software and send it back to the card.... In this case, do we violate it or not ?
Is it a patent for a hrdware solution, or for software? If software then in Europe, at least in Germany and others, it wouldn't matter because softwarepatents are not possible (and hopefully never will).
I wonder what the position of Wine is on such a thing. I guess the servers are US based so it would be a problem there. But it would be perfectly legal to host this in Europe. Or would there be a server which then must host stuff which is not allowed in the US because their absurd moneymaking policy (I can not call such things law, which only are there to protect the income of big companies).
Is it a patent for a hrdware solution, or for software? If software then in Europe, at least in Germany and others, it wouldn't matter because softwarepatents are not possible (and hopefully never will).
Well, since the demise of S3 (I do not remember who bought the name) the status of the patent is unclear (from what I heard, nobody really knows a lot whom to contact to get any details).
But well, either it's a hardware only patent and, in Wine, we have no issues at all. Either it's a software + hardware patent and we can use the code in Wine in Europe.
Our plans to support this was to write some library (shipped outside of Wine of course) that would be dlopened at run time and provide S3TC decompression. Note that, in the D3D7 code, we first need to do some basic ground-work to support this (the main blocking point is not really S3TC for now).
Lionel
In future please do not raise patents on this list. What we don't know, can't hurt us (as much).
On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 16:24, Jonathan Wilson wrote:
What specificly does this patent cover and what parts of WINE would it affect? (i.e. which bits of windows, if implemented in WINE, would fall under the patent?)
On October 17, 2003 11:56 am, Mike Hearn wrote:
In future please do not raise patents on this list. What we don't know, can't hurt us (as much).
IANAL, but I beg to differ.
First, Wine should be reasonably well protected against patent infringement, because (and I mean this in the nicest way possible) it doesn't actually *do* very much that could infringe. What I mean to say is that the API implementation is largely a compatibility shim between win32 applications and native APIs on the host platform. As was mentioned in the texture case, *wherever* the potentially infringing action takes place, it is almost certainly not in Wine itself - and moreover, if the user/host/customer/whatever has a legal right to that functionality and patented behaviour, then Wine shimming those calls on should be perfectly legal. Likewise, shimming those calls on to unlicensed implementations represents a violation of the user, in that he/she has enabled behaviour on their platform (that Wine duly abides by) that they have no legal entitlement to. Whatever, I think patent law (in the US particularly) is a giant pigopolist sham, but it shouldn't be Wine's business to feel the need for online lookups or other "out of band" (eg. configuration) assurances to check whether the host implementations, drivers, and what-not are legit.
Secondly, in any rare instance where Wine itself *might* infringe on patents, the best course of action is to force the worms out of the intestines. Erm, or should I say "woodwork"? Getting an appropriate metaphor for IP lawyers is a tricksie affair at the best of times. Patent holders, for better or worse, must enforce their IP for it to remain valid. Hidden and intentionally undiscussed issues in the Wine source can be justification for patent holders to lurk and not spring surprises until much later on, under the guise that they can not act on IP violations until they *know* about them. Look at the shambles with SCO<-->Linux - it seems that the one evidential string in SCO's bow after all the years of open/public development on linux is that Linus stated publically that he, almost in the same words as you, "prefers not to know". The recent Wired article has some references to this, FWIW.
IMHO, you're better to code, discuss, and even publicise such things. Hell, if you're not sure about the IP coverage on something you're doing viz-a-viz some dubious patent or other, consider mailing the party concerned with a CC to the public list (and perhaps a CC to FSF-legal too). The hardest problem of IP law to overcome is that the mere fear of patent infringement stifles development and competition, irrespective of whether the suspected infringement has any firm footing or not. I suspect that in many cases, patent holders fear the expense and bad press of enforcing their tenuous claims and would rather maintain an unchallenged advantage because others say and do nothing. IP law is the modern protection racket, and IP-hoarders know it. Moreover, the principle of "balance" in IP law is the ever-present risk of patents being invalidated should the matter be openly discussed and disruptive issues such as prior-art be introduced, but "preferring to not discuss it" robs you of this counterbalance. Bear in mind also that in the US, IIRC (and again, IANAL), the patent holder has one year from the time they are aware of potential infringement to when it becomes too late for them to pursue/enforce it. More or less, IANAL, IMHO, just my $0.02, and various other hand-waving caveats are assumed. Of course, clarifications of this from any qualified opinions are most welcome.
Cheers, Geoff
On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 17:36, Geoff Thorpe wrote:
On October 17, 2003 11:56 am, Mike Hearn wrote:
In future please do not raise patents on this list. What we don't know, can't hurt us (as much).
IANAL, but I beg to differ.
I'm not either, but the advice I gave is based on similar discussions on lkml, which did have lawyers involved (at least, at some point).
First, Wine should be reasonably well protected against patent infringement, because (and I mean this in the nicest way possible) it doesn't actually *do* very much that could infringe.
If only that were the case. In practice, I expect we have to implement things covered by patents, even if it is only things like DirectMusic, techniques in D3D - hell, if MS can get a patent on NTFS they can get a patent on anything.
Secondly, in any rare instance where Wine itself *might* infringe on patents, the best course of action is to force the worms out of the intestines.
We probably cannot do that. If Microsoft implement a technology, so must we, it is inevitable. The reasoning is simple: the penalties for patent infringements are much higher if it can be shown you knew about the patent but ignored it.
Patent holders, for better or worse, must enforce their IP for it to remain valid.
I think you're thinking of trademarks. You do not need to enforce patents to keep them.
thanks -mike
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Geoff Thorpe -
Gerhard W. Gruber -
Jonathan Wilson -
Lionel Ulmer -
Mike Hearn -
Vincent Béron