AMD vs. nVidia binary driver?

[Thomas Milne]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 1:40 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 01:34:08PM -0500, Thomas Milne wrote:
>> Also, wasn't there something the other day about NVidia having the
>> only Linux drivers that were stable enough to do hardware decoding of
>> h264/Flash? I'm pretty sure that's what I read, don't know how
>> applicable that is right now.
>
> Yep there was.  I keep hoping open source 3D drivers for the ATI hardware
> will happen to give some choices.
>
> Nvidia's drivers are great, but they are not open source.
>
That's always been my question, really:  why not? What is the
advantage, really, to keeping the code closed? I know what NVidia
would say, but aren't they kinda being disingenuous? For the average
person, of course, the stuff they don't want to share is protected.
But for anyone who knows what they're doing, isn't it trivial to take
apart the 'blob' and see what's inside? Or is it encrypted or
something? And even if someone _did_ get a peek at the code, they
would still be legally prevented from using it, no?

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