3DFX Attacks on Glide Wrapper Authors Rage On

An anonymous reader writes "3dfx has emailed several Glide wrapper authors claiming that the wrappers were developed using the Glide SDK and is an infringement on their intellectual property. 3dfx even contacted the server admins of some webservers to have the sites with the wrappers taken down. " Mirror quickly.

Comments

This is getting old

[Andrej Marjan]

It's getting worse. One of the major points of MAI, I believe--I know it was in a treaty, I just don't remember which one--would have allowed corporations to sue national governments for perceived loss of revenue through such actions as protection of the environment or protection of the citizenry of the host country.
--

Is this what happened to Dave's classics?

[Sleepy]

There's hints that it was a hardware manufacturer that closed them down.

Freedom is dead. We're all workers for the queen bee now. Reality sucks - can I join the Matrix? :-/

Methinks one of the main reasons for the World Bank is to open up countries to the influence of rotten corporations like Microsoft, 3Dfx and so on.

restricting the 'use' of the sdk programs

[Christopher Thomas]

some guy yesterday, under the 'FSF new definition of free software' topic, said that you cant sue someone over the particular 'use' of a program, you can only sue them for violating
a copyright or a patent.

Not strictly true, I think. An "End User License Agreement" is exactly that - a contract that the user has to agree to before they're allowed to use the software. Because the user is "voluntarily" accepting the terms of the contract, software companies can put pretty much anything they want in there, and it will be binding. If the customer doesn't like it, they can use a competitor's software instead.

AFAIK.

(Partial) List of Graphics Card Technologies?

[Christopher Thomas]

ATI hardware runs: Direct3D.

Number Nine: Direct3D (somewhat)

We (alt.software inc.) released an OpenGL-to-D3D wrapper based on Mesa code fairly recently (with source etc.). This should allow any card that supports hardware D3D acceleration to accelerate OpenGL applications. YMMV, but from what I've seen it works reasonably well.

You can find it at

http://www.altsoftware.com
(click on "OpenGL"), or read about it at
a href=
"http://www.opengl.org/News/Archives99/Feb99.htm l">
http://www.opengl.org/News/Archives99/Feb99.html
(look for 2/23/99 under the "Developer" section).

Try this one instead

[Christopher Thomas]

Ok, here is the second link again, this time done right.

And yes, I am too lazy to cut-n-paste! So it is appreciated (if done right ;-)

Thanks. I feel very silly now. I think that's 3 out of 3 times that I've made a typo while mentioning something that our company has done. Let's see how long I can keep this streak going O:).

The second link.

[Christopher Thomas]

Looks like I dropped an angle bracket. For those too lazy to cut-and-paste, the opengl.org link is:

http://www.opengl.org/News/Archives99/Feb99.html
(look for 2/23/99 under the "Developer" section).

This is getting old

[Thanatos]

I find that the recent trend of Corporations suing the "little guy" to be deeply disturbing. For all of it's potential, the American legal system has fallen quite far from the nest of individual freedom and liberty that it was founded on. Let's not forget that many of our laws and freedoms were in direct response the heavy handed monarchy that we escaped from. How is our current situation any better? Instead of the king of england, we now have faceless corporations, supposed to be a single legal entity under law (just as _any_ citizen is supposed to be) rising to power and using their near-limitless resources to stop the actions of those, who, in many circumstances, are promoting their brand name and public awareness without asking for a single dime in return. A corporation is (to my understanding) A way to insulate owners and employees from damages resulting from the actions of the corporation as a whole. This should not be a get out of jail free card. this concept does not sit well with a lassaiz-faire (sp?) economy. It basically allows and corporation to break the law (or at least bend it, and abuse it) and face little or no consequences, because, as we all know, it's bad for government to interfere in the private sector. Perhaps the Open Source community should band together and form a non-profit corporation under which programmers can "officially" volunteer their time and skills for the corporation, then, and legal challenges would go up against that entity, and it would insulate the individual from legal damages, as well as making it much harder for the "unenlightened" companies to continue their behaviour as of late.

Sorry for rambling, this just really jerks my chain. Contructive criticism always welcomed, flames to /dev/null.

(Partial) List of Graphics Card Technologies?

[Cowards Anonymous]

If you're referring to APIs, here's a quick scoop:

3DFX users have: Glide, Direct3D (mostly), and OpenGL (partially)
NVIDIA users have: Direct3D, OpenGL (mostly) and Glide (with a wrapper)
Rendition users get: Direct3D, OpenGL, and RRedline. (There's also an old broken Glide->RRedline wrapper)
ATI hardware runs: Direct3D.
Number Nine: Direct3D (somewhat)

Everything else in the consumer space is pretty much beneath radar.

This is getting old

[remande]

Something I never understood. Companies are regarded as legal entities--essentially people--for most legal purposes. They get the rights guaranteed for "the people", and in most civil law are considered as people. Why, then, are they immune to criminal prosecution? Why can a company get a fine for something that you or I would get 20 in the pokey for? Why does a corporation enjoy more legal rights and priveleges than a flesh-and-blood citizen? There are two ways to resolve this one. The first is to declare that a corporation is a citizen, and can be tried, convicted, and punished for felonies and misdemeanors. When a company commits a crime, it literally does the time--perhaps with a shutdown. A seven-year sentence gets split between the employees and served as time that the company cannot engage in business. The inability to sell product for a month or so is an excellent deterrant in most cases. The second remedy is to specifically state that a company is not a person, and does not enjoy the same rights and priveleges as a "person". That is, the Bill of Rights and similar documents do not apply to corporations. Perhaps another bill of corporate rights needs to be made; perhaps not. Of course, the problem with this is the nature of that bill of corporate rights. I'd be waiting for "Congress shall pass no law exposing a corporation to civil action from a person"...

SDK legal stuff

[BLKMGK]

I've been following some of those projects for awhile. Early on some of the authors noted that at least one of the SDK downloads didn't come with the legal docs, essentially not binding them to any sort of legal red tape. As I recall 3DFX was notified of this but never changed the download. Now these authors are having lawyers call upon them? It would seem to me that if 3DFX did indeed allow an SDK to be downloaded without including any sort of legal notice that they've given up any ability to go after these guys - assuming that's the SDK that was used for their project.

I'm a big 3DFX fan and have really enjoyed my last two VooDoo purchases but if 3DFX isn't careful they're going to aggravate customers such as myself and lose their competitive edge. I believe it's time they opened up the GLIDE API and supported wrappers. This way the API would continue to be supported by software manufacturers and would likely have a speed edge on their hardware over emulated hardware.

Does 3DFX really think in this competitive environment that they can act like a bull in a china shop? Oh yeah, they did sort of cut off Diamond and the other companies didn't they - I guess they do feel that way.... (sigh)