ATI compressed texture formats & auto-compression

[Ian Romanick]

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Stephane Marchesin wrote:
| On 4/3/08, Keith Whitwell <keith at tungstengraphics.com> wrote:
|>  >
|>  In particular it's not clear if an opensource driver for ATI (or
other)hardware can legally compress/decompress the S3TC textures - I
tend tobelieve that this is somehow already covered by agreements the
hardwarevendor would have with the patent holder, but like I said it's
anunclear situation & people tend to be conservative in those cases.
|
| I don't think it's an issue though, since
| 1. hardware vendors have a license tied to the hardware implementation
| of decompression
| 2. you cannot patent the compression algorithm, by definition of a patent

Oy?  Does the LZW patent and GIF lawsuits ring any bells?  At least in
the US, the is well known territory with plenty of legal precedent.

Sending pre-compressed data to the hardware may or may not be different.
~ I don't have the Law Fu to say.

And, of course, it's a completely different kettle of fish in Europe.
Sigh...
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