/** *
Functions for finding dominant direction of a set of colors. * * Uses Arm patent pending method. */
Source code link.
Wow. I immediately stopped looking at this code and deleted it all once I saw this comment. I will never look at this code again in any way. So basically, ARM seems to be patenting some variant of PCA (Principle Component Analysis)? This is the first software GPU texture *encoder* I've seen that explicitly states that it uses patent pending algorithms.
ASTC is supposed to be "royalty-free": khronos.org/news/press/khr
Yet, if I implement an ASTC encoder that uses PCA, will ARM sue us for patent infringement?
I was very excited about ASTC, but now it's totally clouded by this encoder patent issue. I cannot support a supposed "royalty-free" standard that apparently has encoder patents hanging over its head. We need ARM to fix this, to basically clarify what's going on here, and make a public statement that software developers can write encoders for its format without being sued because they infringed on ARM encoder patents.
You know, just to illustrate what a slippery slope encoder patents are and why they suck for everybody: We could have patented the living daylights out of our texture encoders, our universal codec, etc. It would have been no problem whatsoever. We could take this entire field and patent it up so tight that nobody could write a practical open or closed source GPU texture encoder without having to pay up. We could then sue for patent infringement any IHV's which ship drivers that implement run-time texture compressors, transcoders, or converters that use our patented encoding algorithms.
However we didn't want to ignite a texture encoder/texture compression patent war, and I'm very allergic to software patents.
The sad reality is, if the IHV's are going to start patenting the algorithms in their reference GPU texture *encoders*, we will have no choice but to start patenting every single GPU texture encoding and transcoding algorithm we can. For defensive purposes, so we can survive.
Taking this further, we could then turn this encoder patent landgrab into a significant part of our business model. These patents are worth several million each to the big tech corps during acquisitions. We could sell out our encoders and patents to the biggest buyer and retire.
Our defense to the software development community would be: "ARM started patenting their encoders first, not us. We needed defensive encoder patents to survive, just in case they sued."
After parsing the astc-encoder's license a few times, it appears we can legally use the ASTC specification to write our own 100% independent ASTC encoders and distribute the resulting compressed texture data. That's great. But if I go and write (for example) a BC7 texture encoder that accidentally infringes on ARM's encoder patents over their variation of PCA, I'm still screwed.
BTW - The author of the "Slug" texture rendering library has started to patent his algorithms. (I only point this out to show that it's very possible for a tiny middleware company to easily acquire patents.) Personally, I'm against software patents, and I hope ARM fixes this.
No comments:
Post a Comment