"David Foresman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> i always use SBLIVE as the perfect example of this.
>
> Before creative opened the source for emu10k1, the driver was binary only,
> only worked with 1 kernel, and didn't work that well.
>
> After 1 month of being open source, the driver compiled, ran great, was smp
> compatible, and was working better than ever. Now it's even better than
> that.
>
> If nvidia or any of the other hardware makers could do that, they would
> benifit with code they could probably take to winblows and improve
> performance over there.
Yes -- obviously!
Problem is that many companies use many resources/efforts to protect their
"innovations", therefore they fear that openning sources will lead their
competitors to steal their good ideas.
This is the same for ID software, for example, who open the source of
their old stuff because it would then be of no help to competitors,
whereas obviously their current stuff is pretty good compared to
competitors.
But -- openning the source would also lead to improvement in the quality
of the software, provided the base of hackers interested in this stuff is
large enough (which is not always true).
So this would also benefit greatly to the sales of current product of the
company because then linuxians would be more subject to choose this
hardware, once it is well supported.
--
Guillaume Cottenceau -- Distribution Developer for MandrakeSoft
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/~gc/
