OT: nVidia driver [was: Wish list]

[Horst von Brand]

Denis Leroy <denis at poolshark.org> wrote:
> Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > There probably are patents involved, but those don't in general prevent
> > open sourcing something unless you're on the wrong end of the stick.

> Yup that's likely, and if they opened the code, we'd still have our
> hands tied like with the MP3 code.

Maybe.

> OTOH, there's a trend lately of companies "pledging" their patents to
> the Open Source community (Nokia, CA, IBM...). Would it help if Nvidia
> did the same ?

What if nVidia just /licensed/ the patents for use with their cards, not
for /distributing source/? They may very well not even be their own. And
there might also be "trade secrets" in there.

OTOH, a friend of mine got to write a driver under NDA for the specs of the
device and protocols to talk to it... which he claims aren't all that
earth-shaking. But they came in form of photocopies of hastily printed
pages with handwritten amendments and additions. His take is that they'd be
ashamed to show the specs ;-)
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
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