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Carmack rewriting Doom 3 source code to dodge legal issues
- culturestate 15y agoA bit of a sensational headline. According to Carmack himself, "the workaround added four lines of code and changed two." The validity of that or any software patent notwithstanding, he's not exactly rewriting the engine. Source: https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/137189212519792640 https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1371892125197926...
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoSo this patent covers an implement of Foo that is 6 lines of code? How is that possible?
- lwat 15y agoWelcome to the world of software patents.
- jgh 15y agoTechnically if he wants to do depth-pass instead of depth-fail, he has to change two or three lines of code. He probably added a workaround for the depth-pass near clipping plane errors.
- Arelius 15y agoDepth-fail is chosen due to working in the Camera-in-shadow-volume case, not the near clipping plane errors. This is the workaround he needs to solve for considering the Doom3 usage case.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- grannyg00se 15y agoI'm sure six lines of Carmack code can contain a solution that is novel, useful, and non-obvious.
- greyfade 15y agoIt's neither novel nor non-obvious. It's a minor variation on a well-known and oft-used algorithm. Carmack himself said as much when he started talking about the algorithm.
- grannyg00se 15y agoAnd that's where I have a problem with software patents in particular. I'm not in the camps that believe nothing should be patentable, or that some ideas should be patentable - but not software. I'm okay with software patents as a concept (for now). However, with software patents it seems there is a higher than average likelihood that an obvious and trivial patent will be granted. You'll have patents for things like: "a method to confirm a user action whereby a dialog window is presented to the user with several buttons including but not limited to Yes and No." This is just an example but I've seen similar patents granted.
- greyfade 15y agoThere is also an non-insignificant number of patents that expressly cover an algorithm that would have been found in most computer science textbooks - verbatim - since the '70s. One notable example is the Quicksort algorithm (US 5,175,857). Another is arithmetic coding (known since at least 1976), which has been patented no less than 31 times. If basic information theory can be patented, there's a problem.
- sliverstorm 15y agoJust thank the gods they haven't (yet) figured out how to patent the idea of "whitespace" and "comments".
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- CamperBob 15y agoNot clear what legal issues surround the release of patented (and licensed) source code. The whole idea behind a patent is to reveal the details of a technique to the public.
- Jach 15y ago> The whole idea behind a patent is to reveal the details of a technique to the public. No it's not. That may have once been the ideal but has never been the case.
- burgerbrain 15y agoIt was in fact the idea, but never has effectively been the reality.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- brown9-2 15y agoid doesn't hold the patent in question.
- CamperBob 15y agoDoesn't matter. There are no requirements to keep a patented implementation secret, unless for some reason they agreed to do so when they licensed the patent.
- rmgraham 15y agoUnder patent law any user would be violating the patent by playing the game (or possibly just having a copy on their computer), unless they bought a license from the patent holder or were covered by someone else's license. Yes, patent law is that ridiculous.
- sp332 15y agoThe point of a patent is to prevent other people from making things that implement your idea. The patent was licensed to id, but maybe the license only covered one project.
- 1010011010 15y agoSoftware patents are monopolies on ideas, which is a stupid idea.
- grannyg00se 15y agoAll patents are monopolies on ideas. How is a software patent any different?
- burgerbrain 15y agoSoftware is math, and until a few years ago, math was generally held to be unpatentable.
- DanBC 15y agoBizarre then that cryptography has a bunch of patents.
- burgerbrain 15y agoI very much agree.
- fragsworth 15y agoEvery idea is math, even ideas for physical devices, as long as it is well-defined. If it's not well-defined, then it's ambiguous, and probably shouldn't be patented.
- burgerbrain 15y agoPhysical devices can be modeled with math, they are not however mathematics itself. "Programming languages" are in reality nothing more than fancy mathematical notations. Conversion to more traditional notations, such as lambda calculus, is so trivial that any computer science undergrad can do it. To put it bluntly, algorithms are no less math than the Pythagorean Theorem.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- 6ren 15y agoThe technique in question http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume#Depth_fail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume#Depth_fail The patent http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=Om0LAAAAEBAJ&dq=6384822 http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=Om0LAAAAEBAJ&dq=6...
- mambodog 15y agoCreative agreed to license the use of the "depth fail" technique to id, requiring in return that they implement support for Creative's EAX tech[1]. Perhaps Zenimax legal is not confident in that agreement extending to open source. [1] http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2004/07/4048.ars http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2004/07/4048.ars
- ypcx 15y agoIt should not be possible to patent an idea, since most great inventions throughout the history were discovered by two or more unconnected people in parallel. You probably know that yourself, you run to google to check if the domain for your next great thing is still free, only to find someone is already working on your idea.
- anamax 15y ago> It should not be possible to patent an idea Ideas are the only thing that can be patented....
- cubicle67 15y agoin the hardware world, it's the opposite - you patent an implementation. I'd be able to patent a specific design of a mouse trap, but not the general idea of one
- SamReidHughes 15y agoNo, actually, you patent the general idea of one. More specifically not the general idea of trapping mice, but the general idea of a hinge and a spring, or the use of cheese on a trigger, or whatever, as general as you can get it.
- vidarh 15y agoThe point is you patent a specific method of trapping mice, that can be embodied in a device. Your hypothetical patent would for example not cover a mousetrap that uses a box with the cheese at the bottom and a rod over it that the mouse will fall off if it goes out to try to stretch for the cheese, unless that is explicitly covered in separate claims. So it does not cover the general idea of a mousetrap but of the specific method of catching mice with a spring loaded trap. (the method I described above works, very well, assuming the sides are slippery/smooth enough for the mouse to be unable to climb them) - my dad tried catching a mouse alive when I was a kid to show me; he tried 4-5 times, and it caught a mouse each time, but all of them were dead when we found them - we never figured out if it was from the very limited fall or from the shock or what it was).
- feral 15y agoPeople are talking here about the evil of patents - I remember the original deal causing similar controversy. Some of Carmacks comments at the time seemed to say that Creative were using their patent to strong arm him into adding support for their hardware into Doom3. There was also a lot of discussion about whether the patent was reasonable at the time, including, as stated on Slashdot, a claim that Sim Dietrich from Nvidia had demo'd the technique publicly, months before the patent was filed. Some interesting comments here: http://games.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1529222/creative-pressures-id-software-with-patents http://games.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1529222/creative-pr... In particular, the comment by 'Dan East' in 2004 wondering if it'll affect the ability of iD to release source, is pretty prophetic!
- anamax 15y ago> There was also a lot of discussion about whether the patent was reasonable at the time, including, as stated on Slashdot, a claim that Sim Dietrich from Nvidia had demo'd the technique publicly, months before the patent was filed. Until recently, the US was "first to invent", not first to file, and public disclosure didn't establish a bar date but rather started a count-down to a bar date. In other words, a public disclosure a few months before a filing can be irrelevant. Whether it actually is irrelevant depends on some other details.
- krig 15y agoIt's especially outrageous since Carmack came up with the technique independently of Creative. If it doesn't show that this is a fundamentally trivial patent that should be thrown out, when pretty much the second person to even look at using depth shadows in performance-critical code independently "invents" the technique, I don't know what it would take.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- eridius 15y agoI gotta say, you raise a good point, but I'm not sure using Carmack as an example here is going to work, because patents are supposed to be for things that an ordinary person in that field of work would not be able to come up with. Carmack is far from ordinary.
- losethos 15y agoBa ha. Enemy thinks I infringed patents. They don't know what "trivial solution" means. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\QUIX.TXT ek, like one in deep dejection. Seeing him in this mood, looking so sad, Don Quixote said to him: "Bear in mind, Sancho, that one man is no more than another, unless he does more than another; all these tempests that fall upon us are signs that fair weather is coming shortly, and that things will go well with us, for it is impossible for good or evil to last for ever; and hence it follows that the evil having lasted long, the good must be now nigh at hand; so thou must not distress thyself at the -------------- Highs and lows balance.
- Rodrigo_Thauby 15y agoMaybe he should be using his time to fix RAGE instead...
- greyfade 15y agoIt's not his fault AMD/ATi is incapable of releasing a working OpenGL ICD.