Trident Micro Changes Policy Toward XFree86

Alex writes: "According to Egbert on the Xpert Xfree86 mailing list, Trident Microsystems, who makes video chipsets for low end PC's and notebooks, has changed its policy towards open source developers. Get the details here." If you want to email Trident Micro Public Relations, please be polite! Flaming will only hurt the chances that Trident will reverse this decision.

Comments

what i got

[jchapman2004]

i'll just stick with what i have.. it works fine for me

Oh wow, no more support for Trident chipsets.

[Wakko Warner]

I hear Ford no longer supports the Model T, either.

- A.P.

Trident is still making chipsets?

[A Commentor]

Man, the last trident video card I saw was PCI... With all the major brands going under, I wouldn't have expected Trident to last.

What do they expect to get from keeping their specs private?? It's not like they are the leading chipset maker, and other companies are attempting to steal some secrets.

Slashdot and flames

[VP]

Looks like some of the replies on the mailing list are also worried about the response Trident may get from Slashdot....

Please enlighten me

[novastyli]

I have been wondering the same. I really would like to hear an opinion from someone who has been in iteraction with these hardware vendors.

My hypotheses are:

• the internal communication is not going well in such a company and the people who decide these things are completely clueless.
  
• people making drivers in such a company are trying to make their work look more important.
  
  
  

Companies never learn from past mistakes

[SID*C64]

I don't think I can count the number of companies that have made this mistake before. I remember way back when Creative Labs wouldn't release information for direct programming of their SoundBlaster cards; just a cruddy SDK/library you could call from C/Pascal. Well, what happened? Some enterprising hacker just reverse engineered it, wrote his own sound driver in ASM, and released the source. Similar things have happened with so many products. If people are using it and someone wants to write a driver badly enough, there are ways of obtaining the information.

If these companies really believe that their competitors can't do the same thing a 12 year old kid did to get the info, then they deserve whatever they get. I wish they could just see how stupid they are being and save the rest of us some time!

Someone hitting Trident on the stock boards

[EQ]

I thought to check the Yahoo stock message boards and hit them in the wallet (the only place a big company really listens), and it looks like someone beat me to the punch. You may want to mention the economic side of things if you write to Investor Relations as well as the PR people. The addresses are there in the referenced post:

Yahoo TRID stock message board

Re:Write them? Wow. What a hoot!

[askwar]

Get a Mac / OS X

You know, on the one hand you are right. Linux doesn't yet have much of a maket share. That's right.

But on the other hand - neither does Mac, and much less the new OS X. What's its market share? 2%? Yep, something in that direction.

No flame - but I always wondered: Why in the world do the companies support such a tiny market as Mac so "good"? I mean, Linux has a stronger market share (~5 %?), but it's not as good supported by the major players.

Why are Macs supported so strongly?

Sample Letter

[HerbieTMac]

Here is the letter I sent to Trident. Feel free to copy/modify for your own use.

To Whom It May Concern-
I have recently become aware of a change in Trident's policy toward the documentation of function calls starting with the CyberBladeXP chipset. This change will have deliterious effects on Trident's relations with the large and growing Open Source community.

For years, Trident has been a strongly-supported line of video cards for XFree86, a graphical user interface similar in purpose to Windows or MacOS. Drivers for the Trident line of video cards have been written, free of cost, by volunteers working in concert over the internet. The cost to Trident to expand their market in this manner has been publishing existing documentation on the internet.

This has now changed, it seems, arbitrarily. While we as a community recognize that it is well within your discretion to limit the availability of any documentation of your product, please realize the harm that this does to your reputation within the community. It makes it impossible for a Linux or FreeBSD user to purchase your video card.

We are not asking for you to spend your developer's time to write new drivers. We merely ask that you allow us to assist your efforts to provide the highest quality video to consummers, irregardless of their operating system.

Make no mistake, drivers will eventually be written. However, they will be of lower quality for a longer period of time than they would be with simple documentation. This lower quality will reflect inappropriately on Trident in the eyes of users.

Please e-mail me with any questions you have on this issue.

Very Respectfully,
----

My letter

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I just read the news on slashdot, that you people have has changed
your policy of providing chipset documentation to open source
projects.

I find this very sad!

I myself have a Toshiba Tecra 8200 with a Trident Cyberblade XP.
Unfortuanatly im not able to run it on linux, like my server and
workstation does, because I need HW acc. in X and TV-OUT support. Im
very dissapointed about your decision. Please support open source. Major
companies like matrox and nvidia have great linux support. If you don't
want to be left out, support Open Source!

Good question.

[jcr]

I just sent them this:

Dear Sirs:

How can it possibly benefit your company to require an NDA for the documentation on how to use your graphics chipsets?

Several years ago, when I was consulting for Hewlett-Packard, I was informed that HP considered the data on instruction latencies in the PA/RISC architecture to be highly proprietary, and access to it was strictly controlled by their in-house compiler development group. Indeed, even other parts of H-P were unable to get it.

The upshot was that GCC was unable to include a decent optimizer for PA/RISC, and consequently designers chose PPC, SPARC, MIPS, and the products of other, more cooperative vendors for their designs. Heard anything about PA/RISC lately?

Frankly, I'm as astounded by your stupidity as I was at theirs.

-jcr

"These kids today don't know the simple joy of saving four bytes of page-0 memory on a 6502" - unknown

Re:Boo Hoo

[michrech]

Actually, from what I've seen lately, SiS chipsets are being used quite frequently in low-end systems. They are cheap, relativly decent (though I have not tried dual-head support with it), and very plentiful. The "no frills" machines my place of employment uses a mobo that has video/lan/sound/modem built in (though we put it into a 'standard' ATX case so it can quickly be changed down the road). All said built in items are SiS integrated items. They even all have Linux drivers! =] Right on the CD even! =]

Come to think of it.. I can't remember the last time I saw a 'low end' system with a Trident video card in it.. =]

My letter to trident

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello,
My name is Travis Whitton, and I am an avid user of open source technology including the Linux operating system and XFree86 server architecture. I have recently learned that you have made a decision to desist in releasing chipset documentation to open source developers under an NDA that allows them to publicly distribute their source code. I find this change in policy upsetting due to the fact that it means that hardware containing your future chipsets will be incompatible with my operating of choice. As a consumer, I have to make decisions about what purchases make the most sense to me, so why would I buy a product that I can't utilize to the same degree as I can other alternatives? I currently own a laptop that does contain a Trident chipset, and I've found it to work very nicely under Linux with XFree86; however, if you decide to continue down the path which you have recently decided to embark upon(proprietary hardware with closed specifications), then there will be little chance of me investing in a machine containing your chipset in the future because I won't be able to use it. In lieu of this fact, I implore you to reconsider your decision and please continue to release your hardware specifications to the open source community. We are an important niche that's growing all the time, and we invite you to grow with us.

Sincerely,
Travis Whitton

Trident's Marketroids Speak:

[RasputinAXP]

Read it on the Yahoo board.

On behalf of Trident Microsystems, I would like to state on the record that Trident has not changed our policy of providing chipset documentation to open source projects. Trident however continues to require an NDA to be signed in order to gain access to such confidential technical information.

He posted it at 10PM.