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A Lawyer's View on the OpenGL Patent Mess
PDAJames writes "This article has an interesting take on Microsoft's claims on OpenGL technology. An IP lawyer says that Microsoft could make things difficult for OpenGL if they feel like it, basically. "
Can you believe that since Microsoft owns some of the patents that went into OpenGL, they can *gasp* make life difficult for implementers of OpenGL?! Boy it's a good thing we have those lawyers to keep us straight.
Have you hugged your Karma Whore today?
I think they were a little remiss in overlooking the technological case for OpenGL; the fact is that many developers prefer it to DirectX, and not for ideological reasons.
Don't read this!
You might want to read this too.
It even mentions MS could put MESA in trouble just by writind a C&D to them.
Nice world isn't it?
.oo00OO
No, but if you had a history of violent assault, one might reasonably lay strong odds for the likelihood of you doing it again!
Don't read this!
well, the article states that probably the IP referred to was actually created by SGI, and put into the OpenGL standards with the promise of releasing the IP with the standard, i.e., royalty free. Microsoft comes along, buys a bunch of SGI IP (including this vertex stuff), and looks through it and goes, "hrm, now we can crush the OpenGL specification... should we do it?"
of course they will. graphics cards will end up being Direct3D -ONLY-. no OpenGL acceleration. that kills a ton of XFree86 work, that kills a lot of the Linux gaming work.
hell, that might kill Linux.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Was the OpenGL spec (or whatever MS is claiming part of) a cleanroom implementation or did MS recommend it as part of OpenGL? Are their provisions for clean-room implementation?
But don't they just make it way to easy lately.
Like, I don't mind other companies that have tons of products and are making tons of money. Plus, they may have a somewhat stranglehold on industries. But I would have to say the only reason I dislike Microsoft is their apparent philosophy of don't produce good products, kill the competition, and use lawyers as much as possible to help both of the above.
If MS produced quality products, I wouldn't care much about their attempts at complete world domination. But, since they don't produce quality products because they don't have to with the monopoly they have. (Remember Bill Gate's quote from some book I read recently which said (approximately), "You don't want them to want your product, you want them to think they cannot survive without your product. Then you win." Or in rough translation, "Don't worry about creating good products, just manuever yourself into a position where they have no choice but to use your products."
Seems about right for MS lately. (Again, I really am not trying to bash Microsoft, just frustrated with what they have been doing.)
~ kjrose
I would love to see SGI, Nvidia, ATi, and other leading graphics companys to step it up. You can not tell me that Microsoft hasn't borrowed heavily from patented concepts and ideas that were first implemented by some of these companies. I bet it would be extremely easy for a few lawyers and engineers to get together and build up a solid case that Microsoft did not pay to implement technologies patented by these groups.... The concept of Microsoft INNOVATING any of the concepts embodied in DirectX is absolutely ridiculous.
Actually I was interested to read that MS might be willing to swap IP licenses for OpenGL allowing them to get into the OpenGL market place without the usual expensive startup costs.
Prehaps this could indicate that they are interested in getting involved with OpenGL and not just shut it down.
Since I first saw the stories about Microsoft and OpenGL recently, I've been wondering how this is going to play out. Microsoft's whole DirectX thing has largely been targeted/used by games, but what about the other markets that us OpenGL. My specific interest is in the 3-D CAD market. In this particular market, the software vendors and hardware vendors have been exclusively using OpenGL for a number of reasons:
1) Multiple platform support, (most CAD systems run on unix or started on Unix)
2) OpenGL existed long before DirectX
I'm sure there's other reasons, but I wonder if the CAD vendors and other vendors are going to consider DirectX in the future, especially with so many vendors shifting more focus towrads Windows in the last couple of years. What about other markets that use OpenGL extensively?
Have you hugged your Karma Whore today?
Yes, but if you had already taken a gun to school and shot 12 people and were let go, it might be reasonable to assume you might try again.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I remember when Amazon came up with its single-click patent and tried to stop BN from doing the same, BN just added a confirmation page and called it a "two-click" checkout!
Is it not possible to circumvent MS patents like that? I am not saying that these algorithms have the same trivial complexity, but the generally speaking, this should be possible.
All your favorite sites in one place!
Then a court will have to compell Microsoft not to alter the license. Microsoft will basically have to prove the license is invalid. Which would make the patents invalid (i think).
I don't hack graphics code, but I've used graphics programs enough to know that there are usually a number of ways to get to a particular end result with an image. If Microsoft IP were dropped from OpenGL, are there other functions that would produce equivalent output, or are the patents so broad as to cover what the output even looks like, not just the methods used to get to that look?
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
- Get computers to the point where 3D is a possiblity - Done
- Get computers to the point where 3D is common - Done
- Notice a competitor/3rd party owns the dominant 3D standard - Done
- Develop your own standard (Direct3D maybe?) - Done
- Refine it to the point where it's actually useable - Done
- Help make many of the important features of modern 3D and get it in competitor/3rd party's standard - Done
- Point out that you have patents/etc on those parts of the standard and that you will charge large licensing fees on using that standard - In Progress
- Use fee to strangle the competing standard - To Be Done
- Now everyone is forced to use your software for 3D if they don't want to pay tons of license fees - To Be Done
- Watch as competing platforms (let's call them Fruit Computers, and Penguindynamics) die under licensing fees becase you refuse to put your royalty-free API on their platforms - To Be Done
- Have a good maniacle laugh - To Be Done
See how simple that was?Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The most likely scenario here is that they bought IP from SGI which SGI had given to the OpenGL project under a public/OSS/FS license. Thus, MS' claims are invalid. You can't put something into the public domain and then take it back. Sorry, that's just not permitted. Once something's in the public domain, its there forever.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This seems like a good case to (re)raise the legal challenge to the patenting of software algorithms. Especially since there are a large number of recentent cases that assert that software is speech. It is the Constitutional duty of copyright, not patents to protect speech.
A 3-D graphics algorithm is pretty close to the kind of pure mathematics that the Supreme Court has already said can't be patented.
It's obvious that Microsoft hates/fears OpenGL. Since the beginning release of 1.1 for Win95, Microsoft has done nothing about releasing the stub/dll source-code, updating the source-code, or even trying to progress the development of OpenGL.
Time and time again they have attempted to copy and improve upon OpenGL, first with Fahrenheit/XSG, then with DirectX. Yet, through all the technology and resources Microsoft puts in, the masses still like OpenGL.
The principals of OpenGL are the same as the day it started with IrixGL. Keeping it simple, functional, and cross-platform. Although Microsoft has gone great strides with DirectX API, they have nowhere near the simplicity of OpenGL. And with the Alternative OS's supporting OpenGL (Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Ps2Linux, etc...) there are more emerging platforms which they cannot touch.
Game/Multimedia Developers are starting to realize that Linux and other platforms are decent for games, and are developing software for them. No, Linux isn't going to take over the world tommorrow because it has OpenGL, but think of this: If a developer gives both the Linux Binary and the Windows Binary, wouldn't you be curious to compare speeds between the two? People would problably spend the extra $0-5 difference for a dual-os game starting the eventual craze. It only takes a few people/companies to start a revolution.
Microsoft is trying to attack every angle of the industry to focussing our attention on their superior product, yet nothing screams superior when their is a true choice and competition in the market.
<rantmode>
I don't know if this has changed recently, BUT when I looked into Direct3D a while back I ran across a show stopper for what I was working on. If you use ANY double precision fp math in your code the FPU needs to be 'reset' every time it went into D3D code. This sent performance down the crapper. This basically makes it useless for scientific style applications.
</rantmode>
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
Microsoft hinted that it would prefer an alternative licensing arrangement. At this month's OpenGL meeting, Microsoft representative Dave Aronson suggested that "other bodies have licensing terms that are more effective in a corporate sense, and we should look at adopting some of those terms."
This is something we'll begin to hear a lot - Microsoft will do license fees of $0.00 for many of their technologies, but restrict the platforms to non-open ones. The real target here is not OpenGL but rather Open Source. The lack of fee will give them the ability to say "look, we're giving it away" to deflect the attention away from the restrictions in the license.
I'm sure they'll be "super excited" about the resulting "ecosystem".
Yeah, but at work, I do not make my clients sign contracts which forbid them to hire any other programmers but me. I do not stay silent when my coworkers, who need to interoperate, ask me about how I implemented a certain module in order to steal their idea, devellop it and them go to my boss saying that I did it because they could not. I do not charge 3x my salary if my employer ever break the agreement. And I have never ever sued someone because they had reverse engenired a previous application I made so they could integrate their new one with it. Anyway, I don't have the power neither the motive to do so.
Get a clue, it's not them trying to be successfull, it's them being everywhere, playing the king of the hill and pushing everyone else down. That game may have be fun as a kid, but when you talk about economy and consumers rights, it is not a game anymore.
I'd rather be sailing...
What a great way to promote Direct X. Make the other possibility too expensive to license. And the DOJ thought M$ was a monopolly.
People don't worry about what Microsoft might do because they hate Microsoft, they hate Microsoft because they have to worry about what Microsoft might do.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
The worst part is that companies like Sony and Nintendo use a lot of OpenGL too. They are not exactly light-weights, and I'm sure they would simply create custom APIs. . .
Of course, that would certaintly hurt the xbox. I can just imagine the whining that would result if Sony and/or Nintendo decided to use secret "really neat" custom APIs. MS would then have to compete feature for feature with black-box code, in an area where they have very little experience. MS would have to Optimize the code, or throw amazing amounts of hardware (compared to the competition), and still have to sell at the same price.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I don't think that they've actually made it clear exactly how much they intend to claim is covered. If they have, then I haven't noticed it.
It seems pretty clear that the 2D work isn't covered. And I'm sure that they will claim that the patent covers a lot more than anyone else would consider reasonable. So far the references seem to refer to "vertex shading", but to me, at least, that's a bit ambiguous.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If this what a lawyer is telling us, then why can't he determine one way or the other what the bottom line is?
Perhaps it's just FUD. Hasn't any Patent lawyer looked over the issue, outside of MS?
And if MS bought some IP from SGI and this caused the problem, the where else can MS buy up IP and cause problems?
Shouldn't such an issue be the focus....to remove such a possibility before MS makes things worse?
Com on guys, let just ask Microsoft politely to contribute to the Open Source community. I am sure they will understand. After all every major company contributes.
I don't know if we are talking about the same company, but Microsoft has produced many amazing games.
Flight Sim 98, 2000, 2002, Combat Flight Sim 1, Combat Flight Sim 2, Links, MechWarrior, MotoCross Madness... not to mention all there Xbox games that kick ass.
I'm sorry, but Windows 2000 runs just fine, Windows XP runs just fine, Office 2000 is a great suite, Microsoft Money is a life saver, and i can go on and on.
Just because YOU don't like there product, doesn't mean you can speak for the millions that DO like there games.
Flight Sim 2002 alone is worth every damn penny, and without microsoft a game that advanced wouldn't be available for the 39.00 you can purchase it at. Good simulation programs can run upwards of 200 bucks, and have alot less features!
With 6 million xboxen built, it should be Nvidia thanking microsoft.
I don't see Sony buying up OpenGL to use it as a standard either... atleast if they do, they don't publish it and make it widely known.
OpenGL only solves one problem, and that is the Graphics.
DirectX provides an API all aspects of deployment and operations. You get Sound, Video, Graphics, Networking, Device integration (Joysticks/Mice/Yokes...) and more.
DirectX has a plethora of COMMERCIAL support and addons to make producing software easier, cheaper and quicker.
I have yet to see a developer who likes one over the other since they both can be a royal pain to develop with.. Atleast with DirectX microsoft has a vast library of resources, demos, and code to throw at you.
... and it doesn't take MS to cause problems. The general consensus amongst developers who use the more advanced OGL features (pixel and fragment shaders/programs, etc.) is that things are currently a mess.
;) In any case, there's been a lot of stalling over this issue due to that sort of crap as well.
OpenGL is comprised of a central body of standard functionality which _must_ be implemented in order to use the name OpenGL. Additionally there's an extension mechanim which allows IHVs (like NVidia, ATI, etc.) to implement their own funcitonality which isn't currently a part of the core standard. That's how we have Fragment/Pixel shaders/programs today, as IHV extensions from NVidia and ATI. This system tends to work pretty well, but you start to get into problems with the interface. Essentially what happens is that all the IHVs decide that they need to do something along the lines of vertex programs (a way to manipulated verticies after they have been passed to the GPU, more or less), which is true. It's a cool feature any everyone likes it. Since they're being implemented as IHV extensions they're not standardized at all, so if you want to use a vertex program from NVidia you have to use their vertex program assembly language, but if you want to accomplish the same thing on an ATI card you have to use _their_ vertex program assembly (which, by the by, tends to follow a completely different model than NVidia), ad naseum.
Naturally all of this is a pain in the ass for developers. You now not only have to have different rendering paths for the various combinations of available extensions, but you have to write the same routines in drastically different languages to support a given set of functions.
Now getting all of this into a standard extension to the core API is supposed to solve some of these problems, but the IHVs aren't totally in favour of that as they then lose some product differentiation/control/etc. Mind you, this bit is speculation and observation, I don't actually know what the IHVs are thinking, but history shows that they sometimes have trouble working together
And it's exactly these kinds of disagreements that are holding up OpenGL 2.0, which is supposed to directly address many of these problems. NVidia, for instance, has CG, their high level shading language. CG can be compiled down to their proprietry shader code (for use with NV_* extensions on NVidia cards) and, _in theory_ down to the proprietary code for other cards. However, for that to actually work ATI, etc. need to create so called "profiles" which allow the CG compiler to do it's thing. Clearly NVidia wants some degree of control/name recognition/whatever here... in the case where CG takes off you'd need to get your dev tools from NVidea regardless of which cards you're targeting. Now this idea is in direction competition with the OpenGL 2.0 proposal, which gives much of the same functionality but via a standard set of interfaces that replace current IHV proprietary code rather than a compiler ship on the top. Natrually this makes NVidia a little less enthusiastic about OpenGL 2.0 in it's current (proposed) form.
And on, and on, and on.
Right about now DX 9 (really the D3D componant...) is starting to look pretty damn good to a lot of us. It's got standard interfaces for pixel shading, etc. that just work with the various cards, it's a much improved API from it's early days, and given all the extension thrash it's much easier to write clean, readable code under D3D than OpenGL anymore.
Of course you're screwed if you need to port, but that's the plan, right?
The point of all this is simply that while MS is certainly doing their part to muck about with OpenGL (like not updating the damn dev tools since OpenGL 1.1!!!) they're not alone in that hobby. IHV squabbles have always been an issue in that area, and MS' best tactic to date has been to take advantage of the slowness of the ARB (often arising from IHV squabbling) and run right on by with their own API. So their adding to the infighting isn't really that much of a change to the situation, as I see it.
Behold the Power of Cheese!
...you're in trouble.
Because I use Office 2000 every day, and it's not even remotely a good product. It's a feature landfill. It's terminally buggy. The documents spontaneously corrupt themselves in MANY ways. And it still has well-known bugs in it from Word for Windows 2.0, not to mention misfeatures like fast save and Master Document which NEVER worked in the first place.
It's not even as good a product as Office 95 was.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
> An IP lawyer says that Microsoft could make things difficult for OpenGL if they feel like it, basically.
When you've got billions of dollars in the bank, you can make things difficult for anybody if you feel like it, basically.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Of course it would be better to avoid using someone else's IP in designing anything. The problem is that MS's IP in this instance covers a crucial technology to ANY 3d api using vertex/pixel shader technology. It is general enough that the only choices out there are to 'use' this IP or to have no support for programmable shaders. If the OpenGL board has to they can argue the patent is merely common sense and most likely get it over turned. I really don't foresee this happening though. Many companies in the past have owned IP used by OpenGL and it has always been allowed.
yeah, DirectX was just a natural extension of the WinG libraries that provided fast but abstract bitmap access to the framebuffer (and that's basically what the 2d DirectX stuff still does). they also bought the rendermorphics stuff for (initially software) 3d support and provided a somewhat generic driver interface so IHVs could support their cards. they already had a mini-driver-based OpenGL system for NT (primarily to support SoftImage on NT, I think) but that didn't work well on Win95. They did acually have a version of the OpenGL mini-client-drivers for Win95, but I don't think they were ever shipped - it was up to the IHVs to provide their own implementation.
they take the "open" out of "OpenGL" if Microsoft is going to be involved. With those kind of War Chests -- they could convince a jury that water was wine.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Redmond delenda est. :)
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Essentially then, M$ stated at an OpenGL meeting that it has some patents related to graphics. The article says NOTHING about any application of those claims to OpenGL technology in use, the validity of the patents, or any other of a host of issues.
The article slants slightly toward the view that M$ can make things really problematic if it wants but that simply may not be true. As far as I am concerned, in my opinion as a registered patent attorney, there is no story here unless and until M$ shows an issued patent and describes how the claim reads on OpenGL. Move along folks -- there's nothing to see here.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I'm about tired of all this MS this and that. I say why bother honoring their patents. I don't no many people that would honor bad faith laws in any thing else. Just because it's law doesn't mean it's just.
In Rome they used to round up and kill christians, but now look at how much authority the papalicy has there. Laws change when groups act and grow to the majority. Everyone that can should push to shut out groups that abuse patents. You can't invalidate contracts retroactively in the US I thought.
British Telecom claims to own hyperlinking for example, and I don't know any person, government, or company giving in on that...
If everyone not just ignores but protests the law/patent then it can be invalidated.
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offtopic
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Also remember MS doesn't have all the money they claim -- they use various Enron accounting techniques like wages paid in options, pro forma numbers, and cookie jarring to report false profits. I wouldn't expect the SEC to do anything to them since they're the biggest big cap, and it would hurt the larger markets.
When you see someone saying 'MS has $XXB', please remind them that's not true. I'm willing to bet that they're actually operating at a loss. Look at how they're trying to con schools and companies with over charging... that's enough of that.
I don't think that nVidia should feel that MS owes them anything, since if the tables were flipped, MS would stab them in the back. Or at least I speculate that MS would, but only based on prior actions on their behalf.
;)
I hope that MS subsides the next X-Box as much as they are this one. That would be cool
While some issues of patent law makes sense... the very fact that a company can sit on their hands for 10 years while waiting for a product to achieve worldwide appeal, THEN reveal that they own a patent on that product and pick up the market without doing any of the gruntwork to promote it, is just atrocious.
Microsoft knows about OpenGL. They know what it does, they know what features it supports. If it takes them 10 years to figure out they have a patent which OpenGL infringes on, then that patent was probably a waste of money, since its pretty clearly not getting a whole lot of use, or someone would have noticed it before now. Unless, of course, they wanted to wait awhile first. Unfortunately, the law lets them do just that.
I don't know about you, but if I paid $20,000 for a patent on something, and some company was going to town marketing an infringing product, you better believe I would be publically screaming about it, sending letters to cease and desist, filing motions in court. There would be none of this sitting around waiting crap. If I put forth the risk to secure the guarantee on the exclusive nature of my product, you can bet I wouldn't want another company stealing my thunder in that regard.
Now, I don't buy into patents in that manner, especially when it comes to software. yes, I can patent my mousetrap, but if someone makes a better mousetrap, they have that right, free and clear, and I'm not guaranteed anything from there. You can't patent ideas. So you wrote a vertex shader. Good for you. Unless I'm copying your source code, its not a legal issue. And even if I am, its a copyright issue. The ability
to patent algorithms is all but silly.
However, as it stands, that's the way the law wants to work. Fine. But if you've patented some silly algorithm, you better not sit on your hands while someone else does a lot of hard work to develop it in parallel, promotes it, perhaps even patents it (a patent office that allows you to patent the wheel and swing motions cannot be
trusted to catch duplicate patents), and sells it, only to step in later and tell them to hand it all over. There needs to be a time limit on making claims once knowledge of the product is discovered. Not knowledge of your own patents, you're already supposed to know about those. That's what legal departments are for. Wait longer than 6 months, you forfeit the right to claim infringement later.
At least, that's how it should be.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Kill it on the desktop, and you come a step closer to killing it in the server market. Less people with experience in Linux leads to more unfortunate uninformed MS server choices. It's not like this is M$'s only attack on Linux, they clearly understand the concept of death by 1000 cuts.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
MS can pay me *one hell of a lot of money*, and then I would probably be willing to answer this question.
I'll be damned if I'm going to identify all of their competitor's weak spots for them for free.
Nice try, though...
-- Terry
Really!
Intellectual property law in this country has gotten out of hand!
The IRS is a private corporation, 60% owned by British interests!
Taxation *with* representation sucks as bad as taxation *without* representation!
(Don't blame me, I voted for Khodos Perot!)
The UK seems to have avoided the patenting of software, and human genes... and it was your astute guidance that did it!
Oh, King George, Where Are You now!!!
Come Back To US, George!!!(*)
-- Terry
(*) Offer not valid in New Jersey or the District of Columbia; some restriction may apply. See your dealer for details.
But most companies don't care, so don't even bother calling themselves such. What they want is to be able to say "compatible with Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) 95, 98, ME, 2k, XP" on their box. They don't care about "certified 100% OpenGL(r) compliant" labels. In fact as mentioned, many video cards didn't even pretend to be OpenGL compliant for a long time -- 3dfx only shipped a "MiniGL" driver that supported exactly the subset of OpenGL that Quake used, because that's the only thing anyone used OpenGL for anyway.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There's no such thing as "donating patents to the public domain" as far as I know. What you can do is grant a blanket royalty-free license to use your patents. But I don't think there's anything to stop you from rescinding the license.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Unless there was actually a contract signed stating that these patents would be licensed in perpetuity under a no-royalty license. Then Microsoft charging for its patents would be breach of contract. But I'm not aware of any such contract -- just implicit agreements, which aren't legally binding.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Didn't Rick Belluzo settle all this when he was President of SGI? Just before he went to work for Microsoft, of course.
I would love to see SGI, Nvidia, ATI, and other leading graphics companys to step it up ...
Why would they? It is not their role in life to support Linux and other GPL'd software. As a matter of fact it would simplify NVIDIA's and ATI's life if they didn't have to support Linux.
Keep in mind that the "fair" licensing terms will probably be very fair to NVIDIA, ATI, and other commercial outfits. The only group likely to be screwed are the GPL based folks, MS is likely to have an "anti-viral" clause in their IP license that will be incompatible with GPL.
If a single company effectively controls an entire segment of a market by virtue of its patents, is that monopolist?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
It proffered no meaningful analysis of the scope or nature of Microsoft's claims -- offered no insights drawn from 18 month publications, and took no account of obvious and likely strategies that could be taken to counter the "threat" of an abuse of IP ownership in these contexts.
The time is long since past due that a community of open source developers and technicians need to develop a portfolio of technology patents to cross-license against such threats. If significant standards were so protected, even a Microsoft could not long resist the need to "quid pro quo" its blocking technologies, even if it had some.
Nobody believed "us" back in the day when MS first adopted Java. We all TOLD YOU SO! That Microsoft was going to embrace and extend the standard, and fuck it up so that it would not work properly on Windows.
Oh no, you said. We were just a bunch of paranoid unix loving long haired hippies that needed a bath and got off on bashing Microsoft because they were the embodiment of "the man".
Here it is, 2002. See where Java on WIndows is today.
Back in the 80's we told you that NOBODY was going to be able to stop Microsoft. You told us in 1993 when the DOJ sued them for anticompetitive behavior that that was it for MS. They got the consent decree in 95, and wiped their asses with it and stuffed it in the judge's mouth. Then in 1998, when the DOJ came a knockin again, you said - that was IT, no more mister nice guy, they'll put a stop to that evil Microsoft, but we'll keep running Windows over here in our little corner, because it was "most compatible" "most convenient".
Well, look. Here it is, 2002, no sign of a settlement with any degree of teeth - Microsoft has it's fingers in nearly every aspect of computing, and has extended into entertainment, banking, even fucking HISTORY for christ's sake (buying DaVincci's stuff and locking it down). And there you people go, still saying Windows is great, Office is a great app, etc. Well, thanks. You've sold us all into slavery.
You'll now say - don't worry, they won't close off OpenGL (hm - I wonder if they think if all that money they spent on marketing XBox was effective. OF COURSE NOT! Not until they kill of OpenGL). You say, they won't close off identity and privacy (.NET, Palladium).
Dude, we're living in a totally fucked up world.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Fool us once, shame on you, fool us for the eighty-seventh time...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Actually, that's pretty freakin' ingenius!!
Where was your idea when the decisions about solutions against the Microsoft Antitrust trials were being weighed?
Actually, is it too late to make that suggestion? Since one of the offending products is MSIE, then perhaps MS should have it expropriated to the public. Imagine the possibilities.
Mac OS X uses OpenGL...
But recall that when Apple and Microsoft had the love-fest when Steve Jobs first returned to the helm, Apple and Microsoft agreed to cross-license their patents. So Apple's use of OpenGL is in the clear.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
To revoke licenses that have already been granted, yes. But there's nothing to stop them from granting further licenses, meaning no further implementations.
This isn't like the GPL, where you can't rescind it because it allows other people to pass on the license. With the GPL, the original company could decide to stop licensing the code, but you could still get the already in-the-wild code from someone who already has it, who can then license it to you under the GPL. I doubt the royalty-free patent license OpenGL uses is a viral GPL style one though.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
DirectX was already at version 3 when the first OpenGL game came out (GLQuake) - even then it was only using a GL minidriver.
Up until that point all 3d-accelerated games had all been written specifically for certain cards - i.e. 3dfx, Rendition, PowerVR etc...
Direct3D was much more a way of freeing developers from writing a different engine backend for every graphics card out there, and a way of persuading developers to write their games in Windows rather than DOS (there were still a lot of DOS 3d-accelerated games out there then!). At the time nobody really considered OpenGL for game use because the consumer cards out there didn't support OpenGL - To be a proper OpenGL implementation, you have to support *all* the base OpenGL features. This was unlike Direct3D, in which you didn't have to and the capabilities of the card could (allegedly) be found out by querying the driver. Therefore, none of the consumer cards had OpenGL - as to have a full driver, quite a bit of functionality would have had to have been implemented in software - not acceptable for gaming.
It wasn't until 3dfx got together with id and they produced the GLQuake/3dfx miniGLdriver combination that people started considering OpenGL, and just ignoring the parts of the standard that they couldn't do on their cards.
Therefore, in many ways the article has it the wrong way round - OpenGL for consumer cards was in many respects a reaction to DirectX, and the fact that people wanted an alternative to Direct3D which at the time was still rather rough around the edges.
Not _your_ business, dumbass! Microsoft's!!
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
They don't have to now, either.
You are mistaken, they have to because a non-trivial number of people using Linux want to buy their cards.