On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 17:27, Chris Wilkinson wrote: > nVidia have lucrative IP technologies at risk.. .protecting that from > prying eyes is only protecting their core business. No, their core business is selling designs for graphics chipsets. The various patent and copyright laws protect there intellectual property.
> Without that we'd have no decent cards... Except for the ATI cards (now). There are a number of examples of companies who have made a considerable profit without protecting the driver technology. For example, Intel allows anyone to make a chip that emulates an 80386. Adobe became very rich after allowing anyone to create programs that produced Postscript. Interestingly, the latter example provides a good example of how *not* to do IP. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Postscript was very successful in the printing world, but Adobe enforced hefty licencing fees when computer companies tried to create display technologies based on it. Even Apple reacted and teamed up with Microsoft to create TrueType font system for there operating systems; most of the Unix vendors went with X11 rather than the Postscript-based NeWS. To there credit, Adobe admitted its mistake, and created Adobe Type Manager for the Mac and very slowly made inroads into the display technology market. With the creation of PDF (effectively gzipped Display PostScript files with fewer control-flow and IO commands) Adobe took a different tack to the one it adopted with Postscript. *Anyone* is allowed to make a program that creates or interprets PDF. Quite quickly PDF became popular with many programs able to create and interpret PDF code. > > Having said that â in a fairly argumentative way, sorry â the astute > > would note that I have an nVidia card in my box :) > > Yes, and do you run the proprietary drivers? Yes, because at the time I built my box it was the only way to get good 3D performance from a Linux machine. -- Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/
