S3 Texture Compression and derivative compression schemes are patented (software patent in the USA: US6775417) and present a licensing problem for proprietary games when they are used in conjuncture with non-proprietary operating systems and software. Some companies, such as AMD and Intel, have chosen hardware designs that (apparently) minimize licensing fees for the applicable patents but require keeping the derivative intellectual property closed. Software developers are often unaware of S3TC licensing as the fees apply to manufactures of DirectX compatible 3D acceleration cards and OpenGL compatible chips. Thus, developers often use S3TC without knowing or without concern of this limit to their consumer base.
To date, the patent is not valid outside the USA. A Debian based solution for anyone not bound by the patent are the libtxc-dxtn-dev and libtxc-dxtn0 packages.
Apparently during the HTC-Apple legal battles in 2011, the S3TC patent was pronounced invalid. However, only Intel and X.org have acted on this news. Google seems to be skeptical that this news is true or that the patent is in fact invalid.
Related:
S2TC - A patent free alternative
About S3 Texture Compression (S3TC;DXTn;DXTC;GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc;GL_EXT_texture_compression_dxt1)
Since S3TC doesn't support floating point color, these are essentially outdated now.
Tell it to Intel and developers that continue to use both. 2011 And new commercially published games are still using it.
Not all games benefit from floating point colors, and some developers/publishers prefer to support older hardware. So even if it's still in use doesn't mean it isn't outdated.
Is oxygen outdated?
I fail to see how oxygen is related to this.
I fail to see how oxygen is related to this.
In any world view, oxygen is very old.