On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 04:43:17PM +0200, Shaul Karl wrote: > Excluding Nvidia and ATI, for which I believe I know the answer, what > manufacturers I am likely to see on ebay that: > > 1) Usually fully and freely publish the specifications of their AGP > hardware. > 2) Got themselves an X driver?
In case you are lumping NVIDIA and ATI into the same category, you have made a mistake. (In case not, ignore this post.) ATI has been quite friendly with NDA docs for all but their latest hardware, AFAIK. A Mach64 driver was even recently written based on their help. We are lacking r300 documentation but maybe when their next gen hardware shows up, they will be more open with it. NVIDIA, on the other hand, released some obfuscated source code back in 1999 that the Utah GLX driver was based upon. After that point, they eventually expressed dissatisfaction with the DRI architecture and have never released an ounce of documentation or driver code since. Their claims are that not only would their object-oriented hardware model be too hard for open source developers to understand and write high quality driver software for, there is also too much proprietary and licensed information embodied in their hardware for them to risk releasing. To their credit, they have done an excellent job of supporting their binary releases. The unfortunate truth is that eventually the stream of support for the current cards will end one day when it is no longer economically feasible for NVIDIA, and we will be left with more useless hardware that we are incapable of supporting as a community. Maybe at this later point they will consider relinquishing their support monopoly for their hardware, but something tells me the situation down the road will be worse, not better. Your request for free publication is undeniably idealistic. I think it is a perfectly reasonable compromise to provide specs under NDA to developers who have shown themselves to be productive and trustworthy in the past, e.g. by contributing to XFree86 or producing and supporting an own 3rd-party driver like Tungsten Graphics. It is a much less risky investment for the chip manufacturer than freely publishing documentation for all. The manufacturer will rarely reach any individuals who would not have qualified for a NDA anyway, and will most likely end up giving their competitors ideas they may not have had otherwise. The downside to the NDA approach is that the driver is less supportable than without an NDA - once the NDA developer moves on to other things, abnormal aspects of the hardware may be difficult or impossible to understand. Furthermore, he may have left things unimplemented or undocumented in the code that will make people scratch their heads later on. This is all of little importance compared to what we gain through open source NDA development - a driver that can run on any hardware platform, be ported to other system software, maintained aside from the hardware interface, reused in other projects talking to that hardware, etc. We would have none of this if graphics companies were not gracious enough to release their proprietary information under NDA. If they want to go the extra mile and provide their documentation freely, for example like Matrox did in the glory days of DRI, that is all the better for us; but I do not think we should begrudge NDA development at all, because it strikes what is IMO a fair balance between the interests of the hardware manufacture and the interests of the open source community and users. -- Ryan Underwood, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
