On 7/28/06, Hamish Marson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I see the MIT/BSD license as being detrimental to the whole concept of OGP & Traversal. It lets a company (e.g. M$, ATI, NVidea) wait till we've done the work & use their money to market Traversal out & close them down. Then drop the product for their own. leaving us no better off than we were before (Because there'll be no-one left to build boards). GPL'ed software on the other hand has all the good parts & none of the bad.
I don't follow your reasoning. Our software drivers will be relatively simple and straightforward, but also useless to anyone not using our hardware. Certainly, someone could go through a lot of effort to clean-room the OGA design and sell their own "compatible" chip. Only then would having GPL drivers be of much help to us. But not much even then, especially since the drivers will be MUCH simpler than the hardware. Mind you, when I say "drivers", I'm not talking about all of mesa. Just DRI, X11, and mesa modules required to add support for our hardware. I don't see how GPL'ing the drivers protects us from any of the issues wrt hardware rip-off.
(A bit of along stretch for an analogy, but I can't see that the openssl authors get anything back from F5 using their code to bring in sales of SSL offload devices. But that's the software they use). (BTW, F5 dropped their BSD kernel in favour of Linux for v9 of their software, so BSD isn't that appealing to companies, even when they have a choice). (Then again, maybe they do pay, but did M$ ever pay for their TCP/IP stack in windows? That was BSD IIRC).
OpenSSL is a software-only product. It's possible to just rip off the whole thing. For us, the hardware is what matters, and the software is just bits of code that interface with it. From the perspective of ATI or nVidia, we're devaluing the drivers even more than open source already does, because we're declaring them inconsequential and valueless.
Sorry. I just think releasing as BSD would be detrimental to everything we're trying to do here.
I want us to be able to support BSD and any other OS. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
