Timothy Miller wrote:
I'd like to start with some more comments about the release of the
RTL. One concern is being ripped off. But some have suggested that
is unlikely. Whether it does or not, there's another factor that's
even more important.
The issue at hand is OGA becoming functionally obsolete from a revenue
perspective. If someone undercuts us, and they take away too much
business, that obsoletes the design. We should be sure that when the
RTL is released (under a Free Software license--it could be released
sooner under a much more restrictive license), we should suffer very
little from the revenue going suddenly to zero.
[snip lots more]
Timothy,
I don't disagree with anything you're saying: it all makes perfect sense.
In fact, I don't think anyone here is *enormously* fussed about how
ideologically 'free' the RTL is. I think that the thing that everyone
is most excited about is that this will be a graphics chip with full
specifications published, so that anyone can use it and interface with
it in the way that they want to.
Having 'open' RTL is a enormously cool and awesome bonus, but it's just
that. To be entirely honest, if nVidia and ATi were to turn around
tomorrow and say, "From now on all of our interface specs will be freely
released to anyone who wants them, here they are," Traversal and the OGP
would be out of business.
Now, going out on a limb and at risk of being called a troll: from *my*
point of view, Traversal is welcome to require very expensive
licenses/very constrictive NDA's in order to use/view the RTL code,
*provided* *that* they make a covenant with the community to always
release*full* interface & behavioural data & specifications for the
hardware[1].
I'm sure I don't speak for everyone here. But you must be careful that
you don't get too paranoid about the Slashdot trolls' huffing and
puffing, either. Remember that although they all seem to say, "Well the
closed source drivers work well enough for me, I'm not interested," or,
"What's this? It's not entirely GPL'd? Rubbish!" they aren't a
representative sample by any stretch of the imagination.
Peter
[1] This may well preclude Traversal from manufacturing "treacherous
computing" hardware.
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