> > 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. They we have probably met. I am the one who organizes them and get speakers. Want to talk at a PLUG Advanced Topics meeting? > : 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. It was just that "IP protection" was the stock excuse without ever stopping to thing about exactly what IP they were really talking about. > > : 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. You don't expect that in a driver that is expected to be fast. (Like a video driver.) Might explain Vista performance though... ]:> > : > : 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. The closed source people at nVIDIA have been pretty responsive. The x.org people have seemed a bit more pragmatic when it comes to dealing with vendors. (Whether that is good or bad is left to philosophical debate.)
