On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Sven Luther wrote: > On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 05:57:50AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote: > > >What's the deal with ATI's drivers? > > > > 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.
Maybe not but the companies are going to protect anything that is even remotely proprietary. It's just the nature of the beast. > > > > 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. Because it takes money and manpower. They are not going to do pull engineers off of more lucrative projects to get them little if any more profit. > > 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. I'm with you there. I have a Mac and many ATI products that are available come far after their PC counterparts have been released. Though I pretty much answered my concern about this above, I'd rather suspect some sort of agreement with Bill Gates to keep the cutting edge products on Windows or lose access to the Windows market (Microsoft inside information.) Conspiracy's are often more fun than reality. > > > 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. There are implied warranties in that if you buy something that is intended to serve a purpose, like a car for instance, it will be useful for that purpose. Maybe that's the only reason video card drivers manufacturers support Linux at all. > > 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. Probably not enough to make the effort worthwhile. Probably the only reason they do the FireGL drivers at all is because they already had UNIX drivers folks were willing to pay big bucks for. > > 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. I doubt it. Although the US was founded on the principals of people having the rights to the benefits of their inventions, i.e. patents, US law is probably evolved/derived from European law, since many US founders were Europeans. Fred Error Loading Explorer.exe You must reinstall Windows. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
