On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Mark Vojkovich wrote: >> I doubt that it would involve hardware as much as it would >> involve the driver aspect and the JIT compiler for the GPU >> perhaps. Having never seen the complete source code of any >> modern proprietary full featured video driver however, it's very >> hard to say. > > Drivers show hardware limitations and workarounds for hardware >bugs. If your competitors know where your bugs and performance >bottlenecks are, they will use that to their advantage. Their >developer relations and marketing will try to get these features >into benchmarks and games so that your hardware looks bad. >That's not being overly paranoid. That's the way it works. >The goal of every vendor is to have a benchmark make their >product look good and their competitor's look bad. The >competition in this business is really ugly.
I believe you, and I have seen this happen in online reviews of games, benchmarks, etc. at least for Windows, so I don't think it is paranoid at all. >I'm positive that any graphics hardware vendor that released >source to all their graphics drivers would be out of business >pretty quickly. The first big blow would come from their >competitors, then the stockholder lawsuits would finish them >off. I don't know if that would happen or not, but it is at least hypothetically possible, and would definitely be an unknown "risk" for sure. Something that a publically traded company must consider very carefully, for the reasons you indicate. >The only way they can release any source code at all is to >make sure that it's free of sensitive information, which is too >much work to do on any large scale. It's not likely to even be >considered since there's no tangible benefit to it in the first >place. Well, there are benefits, at least to the community and customers, but I know that you mean "no tangible benefit to the company for doing so", and in order for that to be proven false by anyone to make it even a consideration, one would have to point out specific benefits that the company would personally believe are tangible to *them*. But the majority of people out there who enter the so called "debate", only pass off the obvious benefits to everyone else *but* the company. In order to make something like this tangible, it is very much in the hands of the community to provide a list of real tangible benefits and handle the given concerns of the given company in a way the company is comfortable with. While I believe it is theoretically possible at least, it isn't something that would be easy to solve due to the many complexities involved. And too many people are biased to one side or the other to care about the concerns of the other side, making it not even on the consideration radar. At least that's how I see it. -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
