Patent enquiry - mesa floating point buffer support

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

I'd like to enable mesa's floating point buffer support in the Ubuntu
packages (accomplished with the --enable-texture-float configure
option).  This allows mesa to provide additional functionality in the
form of the GL_ARB_texture_float¹ and ARB_color_buffer_float² GL
extensions.

These are obviously not widely used in Ubuntu currently.  As far as I'm
aware, the most common user would be Wine, as DirectX provides
equivalent functionality.

The patent in question is linked to from the GL extension
specifications, or can be found at ³.  It's not clear to me whether or
not enabling this code would actually infringe, as it seems that a
hardware rasterisation circuit is integral to the claims.  Mesa upstream
has been cautious with implementing this support due to this patent,
however.

[1]: http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/texture_float.txt
[2]: http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/color_buffer_float.txt
[3]:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,650,327.PN.&OS=PN/6,650,327&RS=PN/6,650,327
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