Blaming Intel for how the world is (Moblin Zone)

This must be an attempt on the largest company ever to blame circumstances for their behaviour despite having actively worked to bring those circumstances about. When Nokia does this, to take a recent example of a company scrutinised for a lack of openness, I'm sure that people think that, "Well, they don't really make their own chipsets, do they? So let's give them the benefit of the doubt." When the largest player in the semiconductor business sings the same tune, their credibility evaporates in a cloud of either deceit or ineptitude.

"Executives might see that as letting them spend more on engineers, and less on attorneys." That's the apology for closed source, NDA-regulated development in the article. How about Intel actively helping to eradicate software patents, so that the whole industry can spend less on attorneys? I await the usual excuse-filled response from yet another industry player with a vested interest in the perpetuation and expansion of the corrupt patent regime.

Broken window fallacy. Praising inefficiency and obstruction of the free market for its extra employment of engineers.

Tripple-A (AMD/ATI/ARM) all the way for me from now on.

Intel, next time you make a mistake, it's best to either own up to it or let it slip quietly away. Long, poorly organized justification pieces like this just make you look bad.

I edited LinuxDevices for six years, so I know a thing or two about closed drivers in the embedded world. No one at Intel suggested I write about this topic. In fact, I'm sure I'll get in trouble over it. But, it's something I feel needs to be clarified, because too many Linux folks buy these Poulsbo devices and then learn too late of the graphics driver issue. Heck, I know -- I was one of 'em.

Still don't think it's Intel's fault, though. They have to use best-of-breed graphics, if they want to compete in this new market. And, it wasn't their decision that the drivers be closed. And, in that market, at that value point, it's hard to imagine the drivers being open. My own view, not that of Intel.

Cheers, thanks everyone for your feedback.

Intel has no good product platform in the GPU market. While they still sell the largest number of desktop graphics chips, they appear not to have any marketable chips for the high-performance and low-power segments. People, who are interested, will find rumors about the reasons using the keywords Gelsinger and Larrabee.

So the Paulsbo chip was used to keep AMD at bay in the netbook market. We will not know, how much discussions they had about the Linux segment, but it seems that they at least bought the binary driver working on Ubuntu 8.04. There are people, called senior managers, that earn a lot of money for taking such decisions. Annoying people comes with the job, even if they would never admit it publicly or take the blame for it. Be warned they are trained in such denials and may even believe that the market forces them to behave this way. And nothing else we are told here.

In the thin-margin world of device parts, customers are getting smarter.

In my experience, proprietary drivers are often poorly written to begin with. In many cases, nobody has ever audited the code (for security purposes or otherwise) or attempted to make it follow any recognizable coding standard. And there is a strong tendency to reinvent the wheel (in square form) because the code often interacts with the rest of the kernel through a horrible shim layer.

Proprietary drivers also tend to be poorly supported as time goes on. The vendor is often more interested in selling you a new product than a new driver for the old product. Obviously at some point, you have to revise your design to use the newer parts, because the older parts are no longer produced, or too obsolete. But that should be your decision to make.

And of course binary drivers lock you into using a specific kernel revision. This generally forces you to do tons and tons of backporting of the features you really want from head-of-line. This costs programmer time, i.e. money.

I think that eventually OEMs are going to come around to the reality that open source drivers are cheaper for them. At the end of the day, the economics argument doesn't make sense.

C.