Re: Supported Video Cards under Free Software

On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 08:06:01AM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
"Manaen Schlabach" <manaen.schlabach@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
It seems like everyone agrees that Video card manufacturers really
don't want to give up their 3d stuff and that seems to be the primary
reason we can't get a "good" open source driver.

S, sowhat exactly is in the video card drivers they're so paranoid
about? I know pretty well how modern graphics _hardware_ works, and
software, but I'm not exactly sure what's in this disputed layer.

Obviously, the nuts and bolts of sending data to hardware (various
protocols for talking to hardware), but that's fairly uninteresting, and
it would be silly for them to feel a need to "protect" it.

So... what's the "interesting" stuff in the driver that they're trying
to protect? Texture management?

-Miles
--
Is it true that nothing can be known? If so how do we know this? -Woody Allen

And they may be terrified that someone will read the open source and
discover that they have used some uninteresting, obvious technique that
should never have been patented, but was. I can well imagine that
owners of such speculative patents will spend real effort going through
all that commercial open source code hoping for an undeserved windfall.

-- hendrik



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