AMD vs. nVidia binary driver?

[Mark Lane]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 3:02 PM, Lennart Sorensen <
lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 01:49:15PM -0500, Thomas Milne wrote:
> > 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?
>
> Well if someone wants to disassemble their driver, they can try.
> It is huge.  Making sense of the assembly would be very hard.
>
> I think they have a lot of 3D optimizing code to make the opengl requests
> be handled efficiently.  No point passing stuff to hardware if you know
> it isn't needed in the first place.  If their optimizations are better
> than what ATI currently has (No idea if they are or not), then open
> source would let ATI see how they do that.  Of course it may be that it
> isn't even ATI they are worried about, but other smaller companies that
> currently don't stand a chance at writing a good 3D driver from scratch.


Generally in the past one reason ATI and Nvidia don't open up their specs
for open source development has to do with 3rd party agreements. Often they
license technological solutions from 3rd party that they are not allowed to
open up as per the agreement.

-- 
Mark Lane <lmlane-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
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