Who told you that? Don't you think the chipsets can be figured out or coppied better by examining them physically? The process has been automated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineer I use free drivers and they work very well. My use of them is not going to harm Nvidia or anyone else except Bill Gates. On Tuesday 11 January 2005 03:51 pm, Baudouin, Andrew wrote: ... > > I do not support free (speech and beer, open-sourced) hardware drivers; and > the reason is this: > > Companies such as nVidia and ATI have spent millions upon billions of > dollars investing in people and time to develop hardware. Open sourced, > fully-accelerated drivers would reveal the architectural designs behind > this hardware and allow competitors to virtually take down the financial > capabilities of those companies. (Note that this does not apply to things > like the X86 architecture as that is available from Intel for a fee, so > anyone could pay to design their own x86 clones (see VIA/Transmeta)...). > Knowing this, I embrace and accept Nvidia's free (beer) yet closed-source > drivers. > > I (and many other) users of free software cannot afford to settle for a > product having less features/stability just because it appeals to our > ideals. We have limited time and or capability to contribute to the > development and support of this software and we need something that "Just > Works".
