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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Possible S3TC patent issue in kdelibs
From:       Michael Pyne <mpyne () kde ! org>
Date:       2013-05-14 0:59:15
Message-ID: 2615850.Mmb3OclI9d () midna
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Hi all,

I was working on some QA notice bugfixes in kdelibs that have been reported 
for a long time (bug 259826), and came across the DDS image decoder (in 
kdelibs/kimgio/dds.cpp).

The code claims to decompress Microsoft DirectDraw Surface files compressed 
with various S3TC-family encoding algorithms, including DXT{1,2,3,4,5}. As far 
as I've been able to test, the code does accurately implement this.

However as far as I know S3TC is potentially patented. E.g. the Mesa project 
ships any code that can encode or decode S3TC-family algorithms in a separate 
library [1], which can only be linked in at runtime.

I won't tell you all what to do (I'm certainly no fan of software patents, 
especially for something as trivial as this code), but I did want to bring up 
the potential issue.

[1] http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/S3TC/

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne
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