On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 04:55:29PM -0600, Ryan Underwood wrote: > > 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. >
What about freely publish the documentation for older chips? That should help both the beginner developer to find his way around and the chip manufacturer push the terms he is using and his general way of doing things. As for the claim that some people might give up on buying new hardware, creating a secondary market for his old hardware should compensate for it because it should give him a bigger share of the market for new hardware too. I think that freely publish the documentation for the common features and only hiding the more advance ones is also reasonable. As an aside, some one wrote here some time ago that the best way to get started is by learning from a book. What books are there that have substantial part on the lower level of the interface to the hardware? -- "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." -- George Bernard Shaw (sent by shaulk @ actcom . net . il) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
