I have read this thread, and I don't get it. Doesn't it benefit card
companies to have open source communities making their drivers better?
They get free labour, a larger source of talent, and more stable
drivers. Their driver developers can take ideas from ports of their
drivers to put into their own (aka Windows drivers) to make them more
efficient and stable. It provides a learning pool for their own
developers, who can now openly participate in the community. And
finally, it makes happy customers. Happy customers means more sales =
more revenue.
Are they worries that competitors will learn about the inner workings of
their cards, and they will loose competitive advantage? Isn't their
competitive advantage in their ability to continuously innovate?
Drivers have little to do with that. Besides, if a competitor is trying
to reverse engineer last months version of your card, you are pulling
ahead with your next rev, which is already built on your previous good
works.
I just don't understand their arguments.
ICMan
Stuart Henderson wrote:
On 2006/10/18 13:40, Martin Schrvder wrote:
Not really. Matrox is open, but the cards don't do DVI higher than
1280x1024.
They are not.
They used to be, but started closing some parts in the dualhead G550
era (istr some feature upgrade being sold as a software-only update
which may be the reasoning behind this; very annoying because otherwise
I'd be quite happy with Matrox G cards as they're stable, not too
power-hungry and fanless).
Parhelia/P650 range is closed.
Matrox G range is variable - main driver works well, but needs a blob
to use some features. One of those features appears to be init'ing
the DVI correctly if the monitor needs something setup differently to
how the card's BIOS does it (i.e. it is meant to work with some DVI
monitors but definitely does not work with all).
