On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 01:53:21PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 09:18, Pigeon wrote: > > On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 03:39:31AM -0700, Paul Johnson wrote: > > > On Sat, May 03, 2003 at 04:11:48PM -0700, Troy Arnold wrote: > [snip] > > What is it with these dumb hardware manufacturers who won't release > > the specs, anyway? It makes no sense: > > > > - They make their money by selling chips, not drivers - the drivers > > are free as in beer, if not as in speech > > They make their program selling, specific purpose chips, not general > purpose chips like CPUs. Sorry, I don't quite see your point. It's hardware, not software, that they are selling, either way. > > - The information needed to program the chips is not sufficient to > > give any kind of clue as to what's actually on the silicon, so it > > does not enable unscrupulous manufacturers to make a clone of the chip > > You don't know that. > > Maybe purpose of the driver-GPU API calls, the sequence that the API > calls must be made in, or the parameters needed could be used, could > be used by a sufficiently clever engineer to discern info that nVIDIA > wants held secret. I suppose it's possible, but the fact that manufacturers who do release specs don't seem to suffer from rampant cloning seems to suggest that either it's not a problem, or intellectual property legislation is sufficient to protect their designs. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
Attachment:
pgpnBBrG4AgkB.pgp
Description: PGP signature