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Updates from LinaroUpdates from LinaroPosted May 26, 2011 23:06 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501)In reply to: Updates from Linaro by mjr Parent article: Updates from Linaro
People are exerting pressure. Engineers understand what a PITA non-free drivers are, and what the vendors are missing out on by only providing an API, not instruction-level info, and I (and others) agitate within ARM every chance we get, so the people with the ability to do something about it are hearing the message regularly. But none of them have changed their minds yet. It'll take a while, same as it did on the desktop, and change is not inevitable.
Some people are scared about patents and loss of 'IP' control. Some believe their software is better than everyone else's so they don't want people copying it (failing to understand the difference between driver code and instruction set specs there). Several don't believe that outsiders could write drivers that were any good.
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Updates from Linaro Posted May 27, 2011 1:29 UTC (Fri) by aryonoco (subscriber, #55563) [Link]
You could point out to them that if we've been able to write a kernel that's good enough for them, we should be able to write drivers that are good enough as well.
As for patents, you could point out that whether their product has open source drivers or not has no bearing on whether it's infringing any patents. They can keep their drivers as close as they want and still be hit with patent lawsuits.
In the desktop and server space, there are many huge open source programs these days, programs that are essential in the enterprise market, and none of them have been hit with patent lawsuits any more than proprietary software of similar nature has been. I fail to understand the logic that assumes opening up code suddenly makes one more vulnerable to patent lawsuits.
Updates from Linaro Posted May 27, 2011 11:00 UTC (Fri) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link]
The usual argument is that a lot of the patented stuff is not immediately visible with closed drivers, whereas if people give out source showing how various features of a GPU work then it makes it easier for others to spot infringements.
The GPU area is a total mess because of the patent bollocks: as always, the only people benefiting are the lawyers.
Updates from Linaro Posted May 27, 2011 11:53 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
Indeed - that is excactly the argument given. Clearly code licencing has exactly zero effect on infringement status, but nevertheless people feel that at least if they only ever ship binaries it's harder to point the finger at any particular infringement. In practice there is probably some truth in that, but it seems a pretty ropey scheme to base a major plank of your business on.
Of course whilst we'd like open drivers we're not actually asking for them to hand over the source - just some specs so we can write our own. I think the fear there is that writing down enough detail to program the device also shows fairly clearly which patents might be being infringed. I have no idea of the truth or otherwise of that as my expertise in not in GPUs and their architecture/instruction sets.
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