Alan wrote: : Dean Messing wrote: : > Robin Laing wrote: : > : For Linux to get and maintain growth in the public and commercial eyes, : > : the developers have to work together to make these issues disappear. It : > : would be great if all software was opensource but that isn't going to : > : happen in a world of get rich with IP plans in the works. : > : > Some people believe that they shd. get paid for the hard design work : > they do. There's a great deal more (as I'm sure you know) to IP then : > "getting rich". It's also about self protection from other rapacious : > companies, about portfolio negotiation, about protection from your : > ideas being stolen, and lots of other stuff. : : This brings up an interesting point... : : Last night at the PLUG Advanced Topics meeting in Portland Oregon one of Hi Alan. I've attended a few of those in years gone by. Small world. : the kernel developers who works at Intel talked about how they got the : lawyers to allow open sourcing of the ethernet drivers. : : The excuse they got from the lawyers was "intellectual property". The : kernel developers said "what is it"? : : When the layers actually tracked that down, they found that there was no : IP in the drivers. It was all in silicon. The issue is "layers of protection I think". I, too, doubt that there's much real IP in the driver. : What the drivers do is communicate with an interface. The rest should be : in hardware. (Besides, anyone who really wanted to know would just attach : a bus analyzer and disassemble the drivers and figure out how it really : works.) It can be pretty hard if the driver has been run through a code scrambler. But, in principal, you are correct. : > : I am going to : > : look at ATI in the future because of AMD's opening of their drivers. : > : > Ok, this answers my question above. I didn't know that AMD had opened : > their drivers. Good for them! Maybe that will put some good : > capitalist pressure on nVidia to do the same. : : Intel has opened their drivers as well. Hopefully nVIDIA will do the : same. I expect it will happen sometime shortly after the drivers are : completely reverse engineered. (So real soon now.) : I think as long as nVidia keeps innovating, their closed source driver will be a moving target. What is interesting is that, at least before three years ago, one of the closed source driver authors, Mark Vojkovich, was also on the XFree86 Core Team. So he made sure that the closed source driver worked well with X. I don't know what's become of him or if there's any connection btwn nVidia and XFree86 or Xorg these days. Dean
