http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/1529222

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=14459&forum=9

http://bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=50329

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=260180

Doom III vs. Creative Labs
Posted by: Dave Astle at July 28, 2004 9:45:05 AM


According to a post over at Beyond3D, Creative Labs used the controversial patent they filed on the z-fail shadow volume algorithm (a.k.a. Carmack's Reverse) to pressure id Software into supporting EAX in Doom III. The story is being discussed on major gaming news sites, resulting in many gamers starting a boycott of Creative products.


"The patent situation well and truly sucks.

We were prepared to use a two-pass algorithm that gave equivalent results at a speed hit, but we negotiated the deal with Creative so that we were able to use the zfail method without having to actually pay any cash. It was tempting to take a stand and say that our products were never going to use any advanced Creative/3dlabs products because of their position on patenting gaming software algorithms, but that would only have hurt the users.

John Carmack"

Now, if we could just find a truley rich individual that wants to support free algorithms, we could put patents on every possible algorithm simply to keep them out of the hands of companies abusing the atrocious fact that its even possible to patent an algorithm. We need to create a consortium of free algorithms.

Software patents really hit a sore spot with me.

my 2 cents.

-=ben