[Xorg] why is it so hard to get specs?

[Joe Krahn]

Right. In other words, it all makes very little practical sense,
but is very straight forward to lawyers. Things are more treacherous
now with the huge number of software methods patents.

In general, if there are enough hardware users to make the release
of information profitable to them (the bottom line for any decision),
then it probably is better to pay internal developers to do the work
anyhow.

BUT, I think the internal driver development by ATI and Nvidia could
do much better with a public bug-tracking system. Maybe this would
make it too easy for competitors to say "look at all of their bugs".

Joe Krahn

Jon Smirl wrote:
> Talking to some of the Nvidia/ATI people I would say it is more out of
> fear of being sued for patent infrigement that it is a desire to keep
> anything secret. Providing the specs provides documantation for someone
> to sue them with. It's unintentional infringement they are worried
> about, not intentional.
> 
> --- Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com> wrote:
> 
>>On Fri, 2004-07-09 at 10:12, David Eger wrote:
>>
>>>I'm curious:
>>>
>>>Why don't ATI/Nvidia/etc. ever seem to want to release programming
>>
>>specs 
>>
>>>for their chips or source code for their drivers?
>>
>>This is a really old topic; the answer has been stated very many
>>times
>>before in the list archives and elsewhere...
>>
>>Long story short, they don't want competitors to know the interfaces
>>to
>>their hardware, or because they license hardware components from
>>third
>>parties, they are legally obligated not to release the hardware
>>interface information.
>>-- 
>>Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
>>AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>xorg mailing list
>>xorg at freedesktop.org
>>http://freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
>>
> 
> 
> 
> =====
> Jon Smirl
> jonsmirl at yahoo.com
> 
> 
> 		
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