On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 05:57:50AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote: > >What's the deal with ATI's drivers? > > The binary ones, or the open source ones? Either way, your > question isn't very clear. "What's the deal" doesn't mean a lot.
I think you are exagerating, it was perfectly clear what he did mean, at least from the rest of the context. > The drivers are an alternative provided which in the cases of ATI > and Nvidia at least, are based on their Windows driver code. > >From what I understand, the OpenGL code in both ATI and Nvidia's > drivers is shared with their Windows/Mac and whatever other OS's > they support. It's cross platform code they maintain for all > OS's they choose to provide drivers for. The 2D driver is > aparently not shared code, which makes sense as Windows and X > driver models differ greatly. The kernel code would be custom > code written for the given operating systems involved, and almost > certainly written for high end high paying customers in the > scientific and other high end 3D customers in the marketplace. Maybe they could have the whole X driver and kernel module in open source, and only keep the opengl library as proprietary stuff. I more or less doubt they have any IP involved in these part, at least some really meaningfull stuff. This would it make much easier for user installations too, i think. > In short, these drivers weren't written for gamers, or home > users. They were written for high end customers out there and > merely provided for download by mortals as a convenience in hopes > that people find them useful and benefit from them being there. > > Both ATI, Nvidia and any other company providing such drivers to > the communtiy, could just very well stop doing it, and instead > only include them in their high end workstation graphics hardware > CDROMS for those scientific customers. > > Why do these companies not open source their complete drivers? > Because they have intellectual property in their drivers that As if their concurent where not capable of reverse engineering the drivers. > they don't want all of their competitors to just scoop up and use > in their own drivers for free. They also likely have various > pieces of code in their drivers that they did not write and do > not own, but have licensed from a 3rd party. In short, they most > likely have legal agreements on parts of their code that they can > NOT release under open source licenses. > > By these companies contributing to open source drivers however > (ATI contributes heavily to the radeon driver, and Nvidia to the > "nv" driver), they are still contributing to the open source > community, and they are providing users with an alternative to > use that is outside of any legally binding agreements that code > might contain in their own full proprietary drivers. I have no problem for them to go proprietary, but i would very much like a powerpc version of said drivers. Since both of them also release drivers for MacOSX, i guess this would not be very expensive to just rebuild powerpc versions of them. Or for other arches too. I think this is the cost the graphic companies have to pay for not releasing the source code. > >After all their drivers don't support XV at all, so you can't > >use the multimedia capabilities of some of their integrated > >cards like the AIW-PRO and 8500DV. I realize that in the past > >they have provided some information to XFree86, and eventually > >after having their multimedia stuff reverse engineered to the > >group that was working on that. They have, however, never > >provided complete information! > > They've got the right to do that if they wish. Suffice it to say I am not sure this is the case all over the world, and in any case it is hardly fair. If i buy a product, i also buy the right to use it fully. I am no lawyer, but i guess that if you where going to resort to legal action, the judge may well see it that way in at least some of the countries where graphic cards are used. > that ATI has provided more documentation for their video hardware > than all other vendors combined, at least the docs that I have > had access to from all vendors. With people like you bitching > about it however, I don't see how that is intended to get anyone > to release any documentation or specifications that haven't been > released. They could theoretically release all documentation to > everything, open source their proprietary drivers, sell their > company and donate the money to the XFree86 project, and people > would still find something to bitch thanklessly about and > complain about some bug they find. No, there you are exagerating. I hardly doubt that they would go broke or whatever if they released open source drivers. If anything, they would sell more boards. > > I really can't see the problem with these chip designers releasing > >information so there could be drivers written that can take advantage of > >ALL the features for the chips, and boards they produce! > > I'd love nothing more than to see all video hardware vendors > release the specifications to their hardware openly to the > public, as that would allow anyone to work on the driver code. > However, with the current trademark, patent, and copyright system > in place, companies out there want to protect what is theirs so > it can't be used by competitors. They want to ensure they keep > their technology that they've spent millions or billions of > dollars developing in their own hands and not give it to > competitors to use too. It's their decision what parts of their > technology that they consider to be their "assets" and that they > wish to keep as trade secrets. Again also, they license > technology from other companies, either hardware and/or software, > and the agreements they might possibly have with those 3rd party > vendors very well may not legally allow them to provide > information on how the hardware works, or to provide open source > code to the community that allow that technology to operate. > > I don't understand why people find this so difficult to > understand? > > Don't get me wrong, I would love to see all hardware out there > have open source drivers, and see all vendors providing code and > contributing fixes also, as well as providing complete technical > specifications to all hardware. That would be a great utopia I > would look forward to very much. > > The reality however is that we live in a capitalist society and > have strict trademark/copyright/patent and trade secret laws > designed to allow companies to invent/create something and then > own it, either permanently, effectively permanently, or for some > period of time. With this legal climate, this erects walls for > open source, and they're not going to be easy walls to work > around. > > We get what the lawyers say we can have basically, and we should > be glad to get that, especially if the alternative is nothing. The problem is that we get what the US lawyer say we can, and not what we may very well have the right to in other places of the world. Not to count the free development time that goes into making the drivers work, or the amount of time one uses to answer about misguided proprietary nvidia drivers who have problems. They will not ask nvidia, but ask on the debian user list for example. Friendly, Sven Luther _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
