On Monday 10 June 2002 04:42 pm, Franki wrote:
> Companies like conexant and nvidia spend a ton of money devoloping
> their drivers.. they are actually half the product they sell, proof
> is how much better an nvidia performs when the first out nvidia
> driver is replaced by an optimised one, the performance can be
> increased by 25 percent..
>
> should they give that "product" source code to open source so ATI
> can use any "innovations" in it to improve their own drivers? (and
> vice versa) ditto with connexant and lucent..
Very naive and unfortunately widely believed notions. ATI has
all of nvidia's chips. They also have every nvidia driver ever
written, released or leaked. They've taken all of it and reverse
engineered, disasembled them to the point they might just know more
about 'em than nvidia does. The intellectual property protection
reasons for not releasing source, chip specs are bogus. "Proof is",
they already have shared source and specs with all the different
vendors that make boards using their chips and M$ and others. You do
know nvidia doesn't actually make any video cards, and that M$
audits/contributes to their source and specs, right?
Nvidia "optimized"and "spend a ton of money" are somewhat
unrealistic notions. Drivers have progressed thru cooperation with
pcb designers/vendors, 3rd party programmers (mostly game makers) and
Micro$oft. Bug fixes mostly, since market conditions demand that the
hardware is released before the drivers have matured. No idea where
you get 25% either. I've seen ~10% benchmark improvement between
12.xx --> 29.41 Windoze drivers. I've only seen a touch of stability
increase with their newer linux binaries, and still not as good (2d)
or stable as the XFree86 open source driver. Specially with newer
kernel, gcc, glibc, etc. updates.
As far as Conexant goes .... well there's even a lot of Winblows
users that understand fake modems are a bad idea ;p The open source
v. closed source driver notions/pitfalls are laid out here
http://www.mandrakeforum.org/article.php?sid=427&lang=en
The real reason that hardware companies don't share source/specs with
the linux community is that Micro$oft doesn't let 'em, and uses legal
and illegal methods to enforce the status quo. Somewhat neccessary,
but mostly devious (everybody involved, mostly but not just M$).
OTOH, welcome back Franki ;>
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
