AMD and NVIDIA bitchfight over open-source?

[Michael]

There's a Bridgman interview, if you don't already get all of your questions answered by him here...

http://www.techeye.net/software/amd-...source-support

[Melcar]

Awesome! Pretty much what Mr. B already told us here a thousand times. Still, I expect a bunch of flames over this. Some people just don't want to cut AMD some slack.
Started using Linux way back in 2004 with a 9800pro, and aside from newbie mistakes and pitfalls, I did manage to fully use my cards with fglrx incredibly well; sure, they lacked some features that were new and exciting back then, but for the most part you had alternatives or ways of going around the limitations. Now that fglrx has caught up in terms of performance (and to a lesser extent features), plus all the work being done in the open source side, I really can't ask for more. Thumbs up to AMD, seriously.

[BlueJayofEvil]

Good article.
I've noticed that anytime Nvidia is asked about doing something similar to AMD in terms of documentation, they just throw the "IP protection" garbage out there that really answers nothing. What are they "protecting"? No one is asking to open-source their driver, we just want something to work with so we can maker our own driver that "just works" for what we need.

I applaud what AMD has done for the community. I'm sticking with them from now on.

[Hoodlum]

Good article.
I've noticed that anytime Nvidia is asked about doing something similar to AMD in terms of documentation, they just throw the "IP protection" garbage out there that really answers nothing. What are they "protecting"? No one is asking to open-source their driver, we just want something to work with so we can maker our own driver that "just works" for what we need.

Considering they cross licence pretty much any graphics related patents (or they simply wouldn't be able to make a card) it can't be that. Likely it is some other companies IP in the driver which they licenced and simply cannot release. This was the reason fglrx wasn't open sourced wasn't it?

*pokes bridgman*

[whizse]

Interview but no pic? Aw c'mon! (Or is that bridgman with the slingshot in his back pocket, doing a Bart Simpson impression? )

[agd5f]

Considering they cross licence pretty much any graphics related patents (or they simply wouldn't be able to make a card) it can't be that. Likely it is some other companies IP in the driver which they licenced and simply cannot release. This was the reason fglrx wasn't open sourced wasn't it?

The proprietary driver source is shared across OSes (Windows, Linux). Besides things like drm protection, it also contains information licensed from other vendors (things like drivers for 3rd party hardware like thermal chips and video decoders and support libraries licensed from other parties). Considering the closed source driver is >30 million lines of code, it would be a HUGE task to clean and review it for release then make sure it works after all the necessary stuff was removed or reimplemented. Having to then try and keep it synced with the latest changes would be an even bigger ongoing task.

[RealNC]

"Open Source" people were flaming ATI because they wouldn't give out the specs of their hardware so others could write drivers. Recently AMD gave out specs. Now what's the bitch? Go write the drivers you claimed you would write when you get the specs.

[DanL]

Yawn. Nothing new, helpful, or exciting here; just a lot of spinning...

[deanjo]

Glad Bridgeman got called on

Nvidia offers no support or collaboration to the open source community. In terms of open source, we’re in a totally different league to them [nvidia].

Sorry man, respect ya but that is total bullshit unless your specifically talking about and only drivers.

[bridgman]

I was specifically talking about drivers. I know that NVidia contributes in other areas, and that some of their proprietary driver bits get used in other open source projects (eg the CUDA lib for video decode which gets used by open source transcoding projects).

If the article had been a transcript of the actual interview, with questions and answers kept together, it would have come across with a completely different "tone" -- and if that transcript had been handed to NVidia their response would have been more along the lines of "yeah, I guess that sounds right... but our driver is still better".

In other words, too dull to ever see the light of day on anything other than Phoronix, B3D or similar without a major rewrite