I'm not trying to start an argument as to whether or not "intellectual property" is real. Maybe I'll blog about that some time. :) I nevertheless need to point out that being an employee of a State University of New York binds be in certain ways.
http://research.binghamton.edu/Innovation/IntellectualProperty.php The bottom line for me is that I need to stay far away from any cash-flow that might occur. And regarding the IP owned by Traversal, Traversal is defunct, and the IP ownership fell back to me, Howard, and Andy. We're ready to transfer that, and some responsible facilitator(s) need(s) to take ownership (literal or figurative) and see where the project can leverage it. I think that there needs to still be some centralized entity who can relicense the IP without having to ask permission from 1000 contributors. So, on to what the OGP can do... ARM has cornered the market on energy-efficient CPUs. And ARM is entirely fabless. Maybe the OGP can corner the market on energy-efficient GPUs. The design would be dual-licensed GPL and commercial, where for production purposes, all GPL viral-like characteristics can be stripped in exchange for money, with the understanding that breaking binary compatibility with the open design (thereby potentially creating a closed architecture) will cost a LOT more to license. Our chosen facilitator would handle the money and fund whatever seems useful to fund. Mostly prototype hardware, reference designs, donations to other projects, etc. Linux Fund took over the Open Hardware Foundation, so we can use that. Of course, most companies that set out, a priori, to be fabless and license IP for profit tend to fail disastrously. But we're not trying to sustain a company on this. Indeed, the profit margin would have to be painfully small in order to be the least bit competitive anyhow. Our objective is to put a completely open GPU design out on the market, and that isn't necessarily profitable. So just for fun and science, let's see what we can design. André Pouliot and Kenneth Østby spec'd out a GPU shader engine design called OGA2. Let's start there. The first thing to do is my favorite part, which is to argue about architectural design decisions. Then we make a C-based prototype to determine functional efficiency, then we code it in Verilog and synthesize it for gate-level synthesis so we can judge energy efficiency. Think about leveraging the brainpower of the FOSS community to design a GPU that outperforms and is more energy-efficient than PowerVR. A compelling-enough design would get market penetration. Eventually, it would make its way from embedded systems into desktop systems and supercomputers (GPGPU, etc.), and we would all benefit from having an open architecture dominate in graphics. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
