David Preece wrote:
>
> A lot of the reason why 3dfx (rip), Nvidia et al. often feel they cannot
> release open source drivers is that a substantial proportion of what these
> products do takes place on the host processor. Large quantities of research
> go into the exact division of tasks between host processor and offload
> processor, hence a large amount of their competitive advantage is derived
They don't have to publish the source code of their firmware, if
they download it from the driver then a binary image of firmware
would do just fine.
> from the driver code. They cannot afford to release it. Furthermore, AGP
> represents a substantial bottleneck to them, the protocol by which they get
> information down it is also of great commercial significance. Asking for
Sorry for a stupid question but why would not they patent this
protocol then ? For example, PostScript is patented by Adobe and
the only reason everyone is able to use it is that Adobe had
explicitly granted this right to the public.
-SB
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