From: Denis Leroy <denis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Yup that's likely, and if they opened the code, we'd still have our > hands tied like with the MP3 code. > OTOH, there's a trend lately of companies "pledging" their patents to > the Open Source community (Nokia, CA, IBM...). Would it help if Nvidia > did the same ? The problem is that you assume nVidia actually _owns_ the IP. They do _not_. ATI is in the same boat, that's why they are now doing a unified driver. Matrox has been the same as well. nVidia, Matrox and others have gotten themselves in some messy legal issues for code release in the past. So either you create an independent, "clean room" version, or you're at the mercy of the IP holders. I see the first major IP battle in the 3D space. And companies like nVidia, SGI and Sun will be our allies against the biggest IP leech of them all in the OpenGL space ... Microsoft. I don't think people realize how much of an IP issue there really is in this space. And when you have companies that hold inter-twined patents on all sorts of 3D concepts, it really matters little how "clean room" the code is anyway. 3D is an IP landfield. -- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
