Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
Originally posted by: timswim78
Why don't companies release open source drivers? Does doing so release proprietary information about the hardware?
It seems like hardware companies would sell more products if they had drivers for OS X, Linux, BSD, and etc.
One reason I can think of is that any optimizations made could be seen and used by the company's competition. Another is because certain parts could be patented by third parties that contributed certain code.
Ya, that's my understanding also.
ATI and Nvidia claim that they have a lot of 3d party IP that they incorporate into their cards. For isntance they both license texture compression technology from S3 graphics. There are numerious other companies that have patents and such on other things.
Also possibly parts of the GPU and definately parts of their video cards are bought from other companies that probably hold ATI and Nvidia under NDA agreements.
It's this situation when you deal with a lot of intellectual property stuff. You just dig yourself a hole were your going to be paying out lots of money to companies. As the years go along and you get more IP this and IP that and you may sell some of that back out you can get all sorts of weird stuff happenning.
It can be quite expensive to untangle yourself from that.
For instance you had a big deal between SCO and Microsoft years ago. You see SCO Unix and Microsoft NT were big competitors in some markets. They (besides novell, which I don't realy think counted in this case) were both the only realy major server operating systems that ran on commodity x86 hardware.
So a long time ago.. before that, before DOS...
Well Microsoft's first operating system was Xenix, which was a AT&T Unix derivative. Also they actually hired SCO to program on it, ironicly.
So Xenix went on for a while. It was popular in the sort of store front business thing. Blockbuster was a big user of it and that sort of thing.
Well AT&T wanted to buy back some of the Xenix stuff and Microsoft was willing as long as the code would provide a certain level of compatability with existing Xenix applications.
So fast forward a few years and...
Through a series of accusions and somewhat related some BSD-killing lawsuites SCO obtained rights to the code from AT&T. They also inherented a lot of the oddball contracts and weird obligations that came along with it from teh years and years of oddball 80's style licensing from code drops and such.
Of the the major restrictions they had to deal with was that clause that said that they had to be compatable with some Microsoft Xenix stuff. This was realy starting to hurt them development-wise because all that crap was so very obsolete that it was completely useless to anybody. It was like a albratross around their neck.
So now it was SCO vs Microsoft operating under the same or similar markets and SCO wanted to get out from underneath this obligation. Obviously Microsoft refused and there was a big deal about it and it was a mess and eventually SCO had to sue them in Europe in order to convince Microsoft to accept payment to lift the restrictions on their own code.
So that's just one thing.
Imagine all the sorts of potentially bizzare relationships ATI and Nvidia have built up over the years. Companies have come and gone. Nvidia bought out a big hunk of SGI. Microsoft bought some SGI IP probably. All sorts of odd cross-licensing this or that has gone on.
I don't know how much of this is true, but I wouldn't be suprised that Nvidia and ATI couldn't release their code even if they wanted to. Wanted very very much to. It may not be up to them.
You may end up seeing both companies go through a complete card redesign before they could realy support Linux properly.
It's stuff like that were I realy hold this guy's 'AMD is thinking very strongly about releasing open source blah-blah-blah' with a big suspicion.
AMD may not be able to even if they wanted to.
Personally I think the best we are likely to see would be whole new drivers made under NDA by some company like Tungsten graphics, like what Intel does.
But everything is changing. OS X is now using Intel + ATI. ATI is now owned by AMD. What is going on with that?
Notebooks outsell Desktops. This means that you buy a video card bundled deeply with your computer for it's lifetime. What sort of effect is this going to have?
PC gaming is moving away. Console gaming machines as capable as any PC are now coming on the market. What is going to happen with this?