Some notes on Linux and free drivers

Some notes on Linux and free drivers

Posted Apr 20, 2006 15:35 UTC (Thu) by tshow (subscriber, #6411)
Parent article: Some notes on Linux and free drivers

Remember that what the PR office at a company tells you is often only tangentally related to reality.

There is one argument for keeping the drivers closed, and it's being used by the legal departments (ie: the people who really make the decisions) at most or perhaps all of the major graphics card manufacturers: patents. More specifically, all of the major graphics card providers are infringing each other's (and other people's) patents. They aren't totally sure which patents they are infringing on, but all the engineers I've worked with are certain that there are infringements in both their hardware and software, probably going back years and through billions of dollars worth of product.

Copyright infringement is also a problem; when you hire armies of developers and set them on writing something, some of them are going to copy things they find on the net without attribution.

Refusal to ship source is at least partly done as a head-in-the-sand defense against patent and copyright infringement lawsuits. That one of the (formerly) major graphics card producers up here in Canada got nailed for copyright infringement in their driver code hasn't helped, either. Rather than try to solve the problem, obscurity and denial are being used to hide it.

It's not the only problem, of course. There are misguided ideas about competition and reverse-engineering lead times, as well as downright stupid belief that if the public knows about hardware bugs it will result in face (or sales) loss. The IP law problem is a major issue, though.

In order to get chip specs and hardware level docs freely released again, we're going to have to do something about the mess of an intellectual property legal system we currently have. In the graphics industry in particular, IP law has been crippling everyone for years.

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