Re: Nvidia's closed-source policy
Well, it's a little more complicated than that. They have hard-won
software optimizations in their drivers that they don't necessarily
want to give away to their competitors any faster than they have
to. As for competitors disassembling their binaries, you may be
assuming a competence level that is a little too high; remember that
we're talking about Windows and MacOS developers here ~:^)
But seriously, they can't stop competitors from disassembling, but
in reality that is a huge amount of work, it ties up top-talent
developers who are in short supply as it is, and it also takes a lot
of time and other resources. These companies count on that to keep
their competitors a step or two behind. One of the several reasons
that Nvidia smashed so many competitors is that they have a fairly
serious software development effort, whereas 3dfx and others really
considered that an afterthought, in many respects. They don't want
to let anyone know in one fell swoop how much is done in the drivers
with MMX and the like vs. how much is done in hardware, because,
well, because that would be telling. I think it was S3 that used to
divulge all the complete specs necessary for independent parties to
write drivers. That was great for XFree86. Does anyone know if S3
is still around? ~:^)
I think Nvidia isn't too bad compared with some others that have
come before them. Also, they weren't overly interested because
prior to X4 and 2.4 the software architecture was not conducive to
high performance graphics. Linux didn't even support AGP until
recently, and that support is not mainstream yet. Quite a few of
the hardware optimizations for 3D don't do much good (beyond what
their current drivers for XF86 are capable of) without that.
Nevertheless they have put out drivers and libraries that allow
freaks like me to play Quake3 on my massively overclocked Celeron.
At least they employ people who are tasked with developing drivers
for XFree86 and Linux. Most hardware companies don't. As for PPC
sales, I'm sure they are trying hard to notice that
drop-in-the-bucket, but right now I think they are way too busy
wringing their hands and jumping up and down over the X-Box PoS.
a
Peter Cordes wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 08:39:43AM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> > I kinda agree with nvidia myself. They've got the 3d graphics market on the
> > PC corned. Why would you give away that just for a driver? From what I've
> > seen, they have OSSed the kernel-interfaces of the driver. That's fine with
> > me.
> >
> > If they want to have to give extra support to keep that edge, good for them.
>
> That argument is utter bullshit. If ATI or Matrox wanted to know how they
> programmed their video hardware, they'd dissassemble the binaries. I don't
> think it would help them much anyway, though. It's not like knowing how to
> program it is the same as knowing how it works or how its implemented.
>
> The public are the ones hurt by keeping the source closed, since stuff that
> will be distributed to the public has to be legal. Stuff that other
> companies do for their own benefit can be shady, like disassembling drivers
> if that would actually help, but illegal stuff can't be distributed.
>
> IMHO, any hardware company with half a brain should realize that the better
> the software that runs their hardware is, the more people will want their
> hardware. If NV had accelerated 3D using Free software, I wouldn't think
> twice about buying their hardware. As it is, I'm in favour of Matrox or
> ATI. I'm getting a used 3dfx card, too.
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