On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 05:25:40PM +0100, Tiammazzo wrote: > Will ever NVidia release register specs of geforce & riva??? Not anytime soon. The main cause is licensing of technologies, nvidia simply isn't allowed to give docs to most stuff. Second cause is advantages over competitors. Remember, information == money and if you reach a big enough market share, you have very few reasons to make the information that allowed this public.
> If not, why???? Because we live in an imperfect world. Deal with it, code opensource stuff. I see gensig found a proper tagline as well :-) > Till when we'll have a non-functional framebuffer device and fbdev libraries > (like DirectFB, see www.directfb.org) will not be able to use > hw-acceleration?? Unless you live in USA, you still can reverse-engineer and do trial/error stuff. Yes, it sucks compared to even humble docs, but noone is preventing you from doing so. > The release of specs (like matrox and ati already did) would be welcome by > all the opensource comunity!!!! From what I know, Matrox doesn't publish 100% docs either, and ATI actually: - doesn't release docs to "community", only to registered developers that have to agree to a NDA. From practical point of view indeed anyone can have them with a little effort, but from "RMS Point of view" they are still proprietary, definitely not opensource or public domain. Please note this isn't supposed to be a negative remark, I'm only trying to correct the statements. A LOT of other drivers for linux / X are written this way, registered developers get docs under NDA and can write GPL/BSD/whatever code. - doesn't give ALL docs we'd like, mostly for the same reasons as Nvidia. tvout is undocumented on either matrox or ati because of macrovision, and the new radeon 8500 3d stuff isn't documented 100% (I assume because it is the first thing that was able to come near the consumer 3d market leader nvidia since a couple of years) > Hi all :-) Bye, Peter Surda (Shurdeek) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, ICQ 10236103, +436505122023 -- - "The world we're living in lies always in darkness." - "That's why we're seeking the light."
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