On 30 Nov, enterfornone scribbled:
-> On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 02:12:34PM -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
->
->> people why cry "open source" for the drivers mainyl don't knwo the
->> market, the reasons or whats going on.
->
-> I admit, I don't know the market. But I've never understood the need for
-> closed source drivers. The argument is usually along the lines of
-> "if we open source our drivers our competitors will reimplement our
-> product". But a driver should just be an interface between the OS and the
-> device. All of the implementation should be in hardware, giving away the
-> interface isn't going to help your competitors reimplement your device
-> (it may help them make a compatible device, but who would make a card that
-> is compatible, but slower than existing video cards).
not with opengl. nvidia has opensourced specs for 2D - but their 3D is
"Sacred" as oepngls is mroe than just programming registers - a lot fo
their drivers have highyl optmized geometry calculation code theat
thigns cal fall back on - that is part of their product - not only is
their hardware better - their drivers are as fast as can be - minimizing
the time taken form application request to display. they have had code
stolen before by other vendors and do not want that to happen again -
once bitten twice shy. they have very special hardware they also dont
want peole seeing too much of the innards of - any smart engineer can
easily figure out what their hardware is doign and get a leapfrog
advantage if they can see how at the lowest level its programmed - it's
amazing how much low level programming information reveals if you knw
how to use it. most poepl don't understand this and thats why they don't
understand why nvidia are hesitant. they still provide the good aspects
of opensource - they listen to bug reports and fix them fast with good
turnarounds.
-> The only reason I can think of for proprietary drivers would be in the
-> case of devices such as winmodems that do most of their work in software.
-> In the case of video cards I would hope that this isn't an issue.
not true with opengl due it its might higher level nature.
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The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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