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

No need to write to Trident

[fobbman]

As soon as vendors announce that they will be CyberBladeXP or later Trident chipsets simply send an email to the vendors sales department notifying them that you will not be buying their laptop because the video subsystem does not work with your chosen security-based operating system.

Trident won't respond to a few users, but they will respond to vendors who are fielding complaints.

CyberBlade XP, eh?

[EnderWiggnz]

hrm... "XP"

i wonder if MS is in the backrooms twisting some arms...

Why do companies do this type of thing?

[schatt]

This is a serious question:
Why do companies do this sort of thing with their products? It would seem to me that having the interface to a particular chip would not be particularly helpful to designing a competitor, ("Well, if I tell it to draw a blue square, it draws a blue square! I know how to copy that!") so what good does this do?
I've always been under the (possibly mistaken) impression that it made more sense to distribute specifications to everyone, so that others could use your hardware. If you have to write the drivers yourself for every operating system that you are going to allow to use your hardware then that would add quickly up to a rather large expense, wouldn't it?
Are drivers really that much of a proprietary, critical secret for hardware companies? Does having the source code for your drivers help anyone else create drivers for their products? What benefit is there in preventing others from having the drivers?
Sorry if these questions seem silly or unimportant, but I've never understood the other side of the secrecy of our drivers argument.

Re:Code monkeys

[ZxCv]

It's not so much the chip won't be supported at all-- the standard Trident driver should still work. What they're referring to more is the proprietary acceleration features built into the chip. Those types of added features and benefits (which are actually probably required for any decent output from the card) are what will be missing.

at this point can we help or hurt?

[Frizzled]

(from the last post off xfree86.org on this issue):

Significant amounts of well-reasoned arguments in emails from end users might possibly have an impact. Of course, as soon as this hits /., they will get 10 times as much flamage as reasoned argument, and be even more convinced that Open Source is not where they care to invest their efforts.

sad, but true. there are a lot of good arguments to be made for keeping this information open to the public. but when an issue like this gets pushed into everyone's view it tends to generate comments that might push the company further away from open source instead of closer to it.

granted, the "cat's out of the bag" at this point, let's just hope trident sees the light and reverses their decision (before 3d acceleration took off, all i used was a trident, 2MBs of video RAM ... woot!)

_f

confusion over trident

[johnjones]

there has always been a bit of confusion over trident drivers

e.g. the CYBER9385 this had at one stage 3 drivers distributed in a major release this is because they named chips the same

Trident supplies low cost chips because they are small (as in die size) and thus makes them less power hungry which is essential in laptops

the problem is that lately they have done into the onboard chipset market with Mother Board manufactures garbing them as a cheap way to stick video on board

then trident accelerated parts of their chips for these vendors

they have always been tight but allowed NDA people to help out writing drivers

the people you should complain to are the MB manufacturers who properly paid for the work to be done

so this begs the question who uses trident that you know ?

me I know SIS do so

write to
China
Ms. Ellie Yin
Tel:886+2+29161619 ext.346
E-mail: ellie@sis.com.tw.

Europe, Taiwan, Japan, Korea:
Ms. Jessie Lee
Tel:886+2+29161619 ext.341
E-mail: jessie@sis.com.tw

America(Canada,U.S., and Latin America), Oceania:
Miss Michele Huang
Tel:886+2+29161619 ext.345
E-mail: michele@sis.com.tw.

for your appropriate dealer

regards

john jones

Here's one helpful arguement

[rkent]

there are a lot of good arguments to be made for keeping this information open to the public.

Very true. And since the contact address given was public_relations@tridentmicro.com, I chose a PR-related arguement: first of all, all open source users (growing in number!) will have to avoid this new chipset, since it won't be supported. But more importantly, we'll remember Trident's decision and be less likely to support them in the future. Here's the letter I sent to that address; feel free use it as an inspiration for a note (not flame) of your own:

Hi -

I recently learned that Trident has decided not to provide chipset
documentation for the CyberBladeXP chipset to open source developers.
The effect of this decision is that Trident customers who choose to use
open source operating systems such as Linux or BSD with their computers
will not enjoy the full functionality of their CyberBladeXP video
systems. In fact, the systems may not work at all.

Besides being rude and alienating to your own customers, this news of
these non-functioning systems will spread by word of mouth, and people
will avoid Trident chipsets intentionally. At first, it will only be
certain chipsets that they try to avoid. But, as I'm sure you know, once
a company's name has been associated with a poor product, it becomes
difficult to trust that company for other products, as well.

In short, I'm not sure if I would even have bought a CyberBladeXP chip
from any vendor. But now that I know it won't work on my system, I will
be sure to avoid it. And now that I know Trident is upsupportive of my
software, I will probably have to avoid your products altogether in the
future.

Please reconsider your decision about the chipset documentation.

Sincerely,
[my name was here, put in yours]

Re:Its just Open Source vs. IP confidentiality

[nyet]

When you patent something, you make its design public knowledge. No one can use that knowledge without your permission. Thus refusing to document an API because it's patented is inherently contradictory.

Very true. But in this PARTICULAR situation, Trident is no doubt in the process of obtaining patent(s). Which means that from their perspective they need to play it safe until the patent has been awarded. I'm not a fan of patents, but this is the way the game is (and always has been) played.

In many cases, API hoarding is done by a CTO or a product manager or two who thinks their technology is so wonderful and original that 1) nobody has done it before 2) nobody is smart enough to do it on their own and 3) exposing the API will allow somebody to "steal" their brilliant idea.

Very rarely does this type of CTO/manager have any academic/scientific background; normally they are MBA types who think every passing clever idea they have is a potential make-money-fast scheme.

Most REAL engineers/scientists realize that most everything has already been done, and most "innovations" are built upon millions of other (much older) ideas.

Unfortunately, most of the population does not belong in this category, and thinks that Salad Shooters(TM) need patent protection.